Bank of common knowledge

 

In this post I would like to talk about Pinterest as a tool to find and collect educational content and resources. 

Pinterest is a social network that allows people to share images, videos and information from their own personal collection or from websites.In Pinterest you can create a collection of photos on any topic you want to (education, beauty, make-up, clothes, animals, music, series, etc.). When you ''pin'' something it means that you are adding images, videos...to Pinterest and having a ''board'' means having a ''set of pins''. You can follow boards of your interests.

At my Master´s degree we are collecting lots of recources for educational purposes in our Open CLIL board. However, our chosen resources have to be free from copyright, they must be Creative Commons Open Educational Resources. In this way, there are no legal problems to distribute them and use them at CLIL classrooms.

To the Open CLIL board I have added six links to websites which are full of materials, lesson plans, games, interactive activities, etc. I have preferred choosing these kinds of resources because I think they are increadibly useful for our future teaching experience. By using these websites, teachers can carry out activities for different purposes: prior knowledge activities, introducing new contents, reviewing and evaluating knowledge.

Here are the six resources I pined in our classroom board:

Educaplay: here you can find, create and share multimedia educational activities related to different areas from the curriculum. 

AICOLE: is a virtual community of digital educational contents and materials created by the Consejería de Educación of the Region of Madrid.

TeachingEnglish (British Council/BBC): website with lots of materials, lesson plans and articles about CLIL.

Busyteacher: nice site to find lots of worksheets to teach the 4 basic skills for different levels. There are also articles, courses and tips for teahcers.

Woodlands: this website belogs to a school and here you can find Natural Science resources for Primary Education students.

Audio-Lingua: this webpage offers mp3 recordings in several languages to use at the classroom in order to develop listening skills.

As you can see from our Open CLIL, we have created a collaborative bank of common knowledge and resources to use in our teaching process. By doing this, we are incorporating the use of ICT as a teaching tool in our CLIL lessons. The use of this technology is also motivating for students and allows an innovative and active approach to the contents. Pinterest is an excelent tool to recopilate all types of contents and classify them in topics.