My rubric to evaluate an e-project

Hello everybody!

1. Creating my own rubric.

As you can read in my previous posts (The Earth's adventures InfoEdugraphic, Our videochallenge with Tic and Piktochart slideshow), lately, I have been part of the development of a group e-project. 

Today, I present you the last task related to my e-project, which consits of creating a rubric to evaluate all the different aspects connected with it. It is important to be able to assess one's own projects and artifacts as well as being able to assess others'. Assessment plays an essential role in the learning process because it helps to improve one's self knowledge and learn from the mistakes. 

In order to accomplish this challenge, I explored several options to create a rubric and, in the end, I chose Quick Rubric because it is incredibly easy and intuitive to use. The template is neat and clear so you just have to give it a tittle, a description, set up a score rating of your choice, write the criteria/topic and fill each gap. Once you have completed the rubric, you click on the save button. You can find a quick tutorial for using this tool in my peer's blog: Laura's blackboard.

Apart from being a easy tool to use, it has the advantage of allowing you to edit your work whenever you want, due to the fact that it is an online tool. However, as I have commented with my peers, the great disadvantage of Quick Rubric is that it does not allow you to share your results in any social network and it does not generate and embedded code either. 

Because of these reasons, I leave you my rubric in this post in JPEG format, so you can see it easily. Anyway, you can also find my rubric here.

I encourage you to evaluate my e-project using this rubric and let me know if you find any way of improving it!

2. Evaluating an e-project with my rubric.

Once I finished my rubric, my teacher @mjgsm suggested me putting it into practice. This is why I decided to assess one of my peers' e-project. I chose the one created by @LauraGonGar5, @rpeinadog, @Salvador1987lop, @Anafuertecan and @nievesyan317. You can fin their amazing History e-project in Laura's blackboard's blog.

Now, I will start to explain the score they get and why:

• Quality content: score 2. I think that the contents are coherent since the three activities are directly connected with History. However, it would be more complete if the e-project was linked to a concrete history topic, in order to work a specific content of the curriculum. 
• Multimedia artifacts: score 3. I believe that my partners have created engaging artifact taking advantage of each tool's possibilities to the maximun. Moreover, the artifacts accomplish their objectives clearly.
• Posts reflections: score 2. Although the posts are quite complete, I miss details related to the work group and the participants roles in the working process.
• Citing and attributing content: score 3. The authors have attributed and cited all the materials and information extracted from another source correctly.
• Instruction compilance: score 3. They have posted all the information required and included the URLs of the outcomes.
• E-portfolio: score 3. I find my peers' e-portfolio eye-catching and engaging. Besides, all the URLs provided are meaningful.
• Dissemination: socre 3. All the participants have spread the e-project through the social netwoks using the appropiate hashtags. 

So, their final mark is: 19/21. I strongly believe that they have created a really good e-project and I will use it when I have the chance :)

Piktochart slideshow

Hello again!

Today, I would like to explain you the new challenge my group and I faced from our ICT subject. 

I have worked with the same group as in the two challenges before. In case you don´t remember,they are:  @GMEstrellaa,  @gonzaalo10, @lainez_ortega  and @cristinarisueno.

For this new task, we have decided to make a tutorial about how to use Piktochart in order to help our students to take advantage of it. We are not going to extend more talking about Piktochart because you can see all its details in the tutorial. However, we have to say that we have chosen Piktochart since we claim that our children might be able to create their own infographic and we have used it before successfully.

First of all, we screencasted our computer screen while we were recording orally step by step the process to use Piktochart. We think that, in this way our pupils will be familiarised with it better. To do that, we have used the free tool called aTubeCatcher. We found this program suitable for this task because it is very easy to use and it has all the features we were looking for. 

However, a disadvantage that we have found is that aTubeCatcher doesn´t allow us to edit videos. For this reason, we used the program Movie Maker and we also added a final image with our Twitter handles in order to give the viewers the possibility to contact us with their doubts and questions.

You can see the tutorial here:

This time, we took part in the AporTICs project. This website shares tutorials created by teachers and students using ICT tools and this is why we sent them our Piktochart tutorial. Hope you find it useful!

Our video challenge with Tic!

Good morning!

This time, for this group task, we had to become both writers and film directors! We were requested to create a clip about our common e-project but, first of all, we had to plan what it would be about. Therefore we started to create a storyboard with our main ideas. As our topics were about the Earth we decided to create a character based on the universe. What could be better than an alien? Everybody wants to know about life from outer space! That’s how TIC was born, our main character. Can you guess why he is called TIC?

To create our storyboard we chose the web tool Storyboard That. Since the moment we started to use this tool, we were surprised how amazing the pictures were: backgrounds, characters and different shapes, which allow you to create exactly what you want. What we liked the most was the possibility of modifying the position of the main character, which makes the story more real.

However, while using the tool, we discovered that a normal account doesn’t allow you to create a board with more than six scenes. This is why we had to shorten the story. It was not a problem because the final clip will include the whole story.This storyboard is a guideline for the video challenge and it is meant to be a tale the teacher could tell their students at class.

Here you have our storyboard! Are you ready to meet TIC?

Made with Storyboard That

From the storyboard, we brought TIC to live! First, if you want to film a movie you need to write a script so we became writers! Our clip was divided into eleven scenes in which our alien would travel through the Solar System to discover the magic planet. TIC was dying to find it out!

Second, we started to film the scenes, but… We needed an actor! Gonzalo @gonzaalo10 became TIC thanks to our make-up team! Look at the awesome result!

Then, we were ready to record the video challenge. For this purpose we use decided to use the chroma key technique. By using Camtasia and this technique, we could substitute the green background for a picture of our choice. Regarding Camtasia, it seems quite difficult to use at rhe very beginning. However, after practicing with it for a while we discovered all its possibilities. We downloaded the free version with a free trial for 30 days. Thanks to Camtasia, we have learned how to use chroma key and how to organize the video clips, the pictures and the audios in order to get the final video. The only problem we didn´t like about this tool was the fact that, because of the free version, a watermark appeared in our video and the quality of it decreased.

Despite this little problem, the result was fantastic! We created a video in which TIC travels through the Solar system and discovers the Earth and its layers. Tic also has doubts and makes questions during the video in order to encourage participation in our pupils. The teacher could stop the video whenever TIC makes one question to let the pupils answer him. This video can be used to introduce a topic, so the teacher can know about their prior knowledge, or to make a review at the end of the topic. Hope you enjoy it!

With this mission we have participated in the nationwide educative project The ESL Times. It is an English digital magazine that encourage participation while learning and enjoying.

Finally, I would like to say that, despite a few problems in the editing process, I have enjoyed this experience a lot! It has been really funny to record the video. I have certanly laugh a lot :). Moreover, I have also learned about the chroma key technique. It is something you always see in the movies' making off but you never think that is something you could also do at home! It has been increadibly interesting!