Answers

As a group, we all had to upload our questions to the "linoit" website, which is like a blackboard full of notes and ideas. Each one of us had to watch the videos from Dr Dooly and Dr Sadler and ask them interesting questions about the topics. Both of them were nice enough to answer some of them.

Finally, I made this POWTOON Video as a summary of what I understood about the TBLL and PBLL and the main differences between them two. I really like this tool as a substitute of Power Point, because it involves more proffesional and visual elements and it helps to capture your audiences attention. Moreover, it can be shared directly on youtube or in the website itself. I would definately use as a teacher even though I'm using it too as a student in other subjects presentations.

Here's the link to watch my summary: 

https://www.powtoon.com/show/bzRPTBmUD8j/tbll-vs-pbll/#/

Virtual World Enviroment

With the "Padlet" website we had to post questions or key ideas of the article we read. Later, we had to discuss our article with our peers and explain it to them, answering their questions and viceversa. 

Gathering the information with the peers in the classroom and asking each others questions really helped to clarify the ideas and end up getting a really good picture frame of the concept VWs. 

Honestly, I think nothing clarifies ideas better than explaining them to others. Moreover, an impressive collection of studies has shown that participation in well-functioning cooperative groups leads students to feel more positive about themselves, about each other, and about the subject they're studying. Students also learn more effectively on a variety of measures when they can learn with each other instead of against each other or apart from each other.

These are the steps followed during that lesson:

I can't wait to use Virtual World Enviroments once I start my english practicum because I believe it demonstrates the way in which the use of a VW enviroment can help create a complex interdependency between the young learners and various new technologies in long-term and shared knowledge-building activities. It has the potential to enrich the educational process in a number of important ways that are not possible in a traditional classroom. 

Learning Styles

Before the lesson, we had the task to read the assigned document. Each one of us had an article about the different Learning Styles. In my case, I had to read the "Visual" one. I prepared it and once we were in the classroom we gathered in groups of 4 and each one of us had to explain to each other their "learning style" article they read. It was pretty useful to hear a summary of the 4 styles from one of your peers because we listened carefully and were more focused, Moreover, it's an amazing way of saving up some time, because each one of us had the task to read just 1 part, not the 4. 

Melinda put a power point presentation in display while we were presenting our Learning Styles that had some questions in it and a timer. Once the time was up, we had to switch and listen to one of our group peers. Furthermore, this is another great source of organizing the classroom and making sure you have your lesson extremely scheduled. Moreover, it helped us to estimate the time we would dedicate in each topic and to go directly into the matter of concern.

Once we all displayed our topics, we proceeded to discuss about what Learning Style each one of us had. 

Later we had to suggest activities for each of the themes. This was the result:

Teachers should embrace all kinds of learning styles, not only implementing their own learning style as the most important/correct one.

Moreover, we discussed which learning style predominates in our group and the majority of us have visual learning, including myself. When I study I need to have everything very colorful with highlighters and pictures, etc. Watching videos is also really useful for me, that way it keeps me motivated.

In order to integrate the different types of learning styles in our project we should create different kinds of activities:

For example, with the visual and auditory learning, they could go on Youtube or another web page and try to find videos that explain something about that topic. Afterwards, they could share all the information they gathered. 

If we want to use the kinesthetic style, they could record a video about themselves dancing and then show and tell.

For the tactile learning style they could create another video and explain an experiment while you're doing it.

A drama play would integrate the 4 learning style. The dramatization would be good for auditory and kinesthetic and the visual would be good for video edition and the tactile would focus in editing the video. In the middle age they had to dress with one type of clothes, they could find in the internet the types of wardrobe (visual) bringing photographs of them, painting...  The atrezzo could be done by the tactile and the kinesthetic. The audio could take responsibilities of the music. 

Showdown: Group work or Collaborative Learning?

When planning a TEPBLL is important to have a lot of organization and an alternative plan for contingencies because collaborative learning projects require many strategic planning. Therefore, deciding what kind of interaction you want your students to have it's an essential step in the process. Here's a word cloud of two types of interaction: Collaborative Learning and Group Work. They sound very similar, and sometimes they are referred as synonyms, but actually they're not. I made them with a program called TAGUL, an easy, fast and useful webpage for creating word clouds. You can use them to create  infographic-like visualisations to enhance students learning. 

Once you've seen the both words clouds I made with the main concepts of each one, I think it's clear which one I want to use as a future teacher: Collaborative Learning. However, the key difference remains in the fact that collaborative learning requires positive interdependence with structured goals, accountability for individual work within the group, sharing of leadership roles, explicit teaching of collaborative skills and teacher observation of students interaction whereas group work, has no positive interdependence between group members and no structured goals, no accountability for an individual's share of a groups work, no explicit assignment of leadership roles, the assumption that students already have the skills required to collaborate and little to no teacher observation. 

Therefore, it's essential to promote collaborative learning, especially in the context of TEPBLL, in order for student's to truly co-construct knowledge. 

I would like to end up this section with a quote I really like about collaboration:

The Bus Metaphor

1. BUS METAPHOR.

One metaphor I created to explain the ideas explained in the video is the "Mountain metaphor" which is about climbing a high mountain and getting to the top by starting from the bottom of it. It's a link between the collaborative learning and the process of it which has similarities as climbing a mountain. You start building up questions from the start, the bottom of the mountain, where the students stand as well, because it's something new and unknown, but the objective is to arrive to the top of it. If the students have previous knowledge, they will get to the first stage of the mountain, where they get to know what are their strong and weak points. At the same time, the teacher will discover what are the stuents interested in. The procedure of it, will be the process of climbing the mountain, they will have to know that the final objective is to get to the top, which is a metaphor of achieving their initials targets, Later, they will have to discover how to get to the top, will they need a car? will they need their legs? This means, that the pupils will have to understand what's the best type of interaction and materials. When will they know they have arrived? The assesment stage is the key proof that the students have achieved the initial objectives. How will the teachers and the students know? By sliding back again into the mountain and getting to the base, where they will check the instruments of feedback, the final outcomes and if the competences were assimilated. It's a long process, so the results of learning won't only be shown at the end, it's a continue assessment.

2. Back & forth

It means that the learning process it's a tough road. Sometimes, specific parts of the project will be very dynamic and satisfactory, but then others will be such an uphill battle, and it will seem like they have gone two steps back. But that's a part of it, learning how to deal with this constant changes, with the highlights of the project and the downfalls.

3. ZIG ZAG

An hypothetical example of a ZigZag activity, would be for a example, the creation of the perfect school. Students learn necessary expressions to describe a school by taking their own school as an example. They are able to input their description into visual information to support the partners in another school to practice their knowledge by describing the unfamiliar school. Therefore,  each partner is responsible for part of the project output.

Developing Intercultural Competences

Lastly, I made this Facebook conversation with the following webpage, easy to use and fast: 

http://simitator.com/generator/facebook/status

Exit Slips

One of the things we've been during through the course of this subject were the "Exit Slips" Melinda gave us a topic to talk about, or we chose it sometimes and had to send her an email with a summary of it. The Exit Slip strategy is very useful and I can't wait to use it when I become a teacher, because it helps students to process new concepts, reflect on the information learned and express their thoughts about new information. Moreover, it requires students to respond to a prompt given by the teacher, and is an easy way to incorporate writing into many different content areas. Furthermore, the Exit Slip strategy is an informal assessment that allows you to adapt and differentiate the planning and instruction. Here's an extract of an actual Exit Slip conversation through gmail.

Here's the document I sent Melinda about Peer Evaluation.