Teaching with Europeana

First of all,  I would like to start this first blog post in 2020  by wishing  all of you a  very Happy New Year loaded with love,  joy and health. 

A new year always makes us reflect on the importance of  finding new ways to face the essential  challenges in our lives, both personally and professionally. As I write this blog to try and help you on the latter, let me start by reminding you of Europeana, a wonderful platform I wrote about in a previous post you can read here.  

March 2019 marked the official launch of the Teaching with Europeana blog. Since then, the Europeana Education Community has grown and shared numerous inspirational learning scenarios and creative stories of implementation. But are you aware of all the possibilities the blog offers?

In  the  video below these lines,  teachers share their experiences using the blog and explain how its resources  can be very helpful for a variety of content areas. 

From this blog,   I would like to extend my congratulations to the  people and networks behind Europeana   for  making cultural heritage available to a very global audience.  

I am looking forward to meeting you in our next  seminar session on January 21st. Apart from focusing on  supporting students' written and spoken output,  we will enter the Europeana  platform and  blog to choose the most suitable resources for our  CLIL contexts. 

Developing creativity across the content areas

This  post is a follow-up of the previous one, which I wrote to highlight our obligation to ensure that our students will be ready for the challenges they will have to face when they leave our classrooms and enter the professional world. 

Today I would like to reflect on one of these "21st century skills", which has been described as creativity. We have to  try hard to help students to develop this skill and we have to assess it too.

Let me start by  sharing this short video that made me draw some  interesting conclusions: 

After seeing it, I reckon you will agree with me that we sometimes forget that our students need time to be creative. Maybe we  do not forget it but we  do not allow them to spend longer on creative projects because we tend to think about the number of projects /lesson plans that we still have to carry out and we are worried we will not manage to cover them all. Therefore, let us never forget that we should always choose quality over quantity. 

In my view,  special attention should be drawn to the fact that students also  need time to share their  creative outcomes  with their peers. If they do this,  they will learn a lot together and  others' acknowledgement will help to build on their  self confidence. 

As I pointed out above, we have to find ways to assess creativity because assessment has a clear  impact on students' motivation so you can start by explaining that you will consider creativity as part of your assessment and you can start with a simple tool they can easily understand. For example, if students have carried out a PowerPoint Presentation on a topic, you can use this assessment template.  

I  will continue developing this challenging topic in future seminar sessions but now I would like to share a very recent publication by University of Navarre: "Towards Creativity in CLIL", which offers very good examples of creative projects for different content areas.

My most sincere congratulations to participants in these projects:  Ruth Breeze,  Melinda Dooly, Alessandra Agati, Fernando Echarri, Amaia Alvarez, Maika Goya, Laura Medina, Izaskun Tomasena, Henri Eric Castleberry, Laura Giamattei, Abel Miguel-Marqués, Angela Ruotolo, Immacolata Ercolino and Daniela Amendola. 

Developing 21st century skills in our classrooms

Nowadays, teachers are faced with the challenge of equipping students with a long list of skills: creative and critical thinking, problem-solving abilities, collaborative skills, leadership, communicative skills and digital literacies. How can we face  this challenge? I would like to suggest a couple of simple activities that will provide learners with the opportunity to develop their creativity and critical abilities by making new connections to the acquired knowledge after a virtual visit to a museum.

ACTIVITY 1: we become artists

Objectives:

Students visit a virtual exhibition of Art objects, choose their favourite one and create a video in which they describe the object to their peers and suggest new ways of using the object nowadays. This video project will enable students to  increase their competences as effective communicators with digital technologies and these skills are and will be essential in their lives.

Language level:

From B1 to C1

Resources:

Links to virtual exhibitions:

https://metmuseum.org

https://www.europeana.eu

Handouts for the students:

Describing our Art object

Useful words and patterns for your description

Handout for the teacher:

Rubrics to assess students' videos 

Organization:

Group work. Students work in groups of 4/5.

Number of sessions:

4 sessions :

1 session to visit the virtual exhibition, choose their favourite Art object and write the description of the object

1 session to  prepare the video script and create the video clip (There is a wide variety of tools for creating videos. Among them, I would like to suggest Screencastify,  which  is a very good tool to create and share videos easily. It is an extension of Google Chrome which will be very appropriate for your Google Classroom contexts)

1  session to rehearse  because they need to talk in English during the videoclip. 

1 session to share their videos with their peers. (The teacher can use "Rubrics to assess students' videos during this session or watch the recorded videos later for assessment)

After this final session, I suggest sharing the videos  with the rest of the students and the families through the school blog or website. 

Skills:

Integrated skills (reading, listening, speaking and spoken interaction and writing)

ACTIVITY 2: our Art auction

Objectives:

Students create their own Art object/artifact , bring it to the classroom and prepare a short description of it for and Art Auction which will be held in the classroom.

Language level:

From B1 to C1

Resources:

Handouts for the whole process:

The same handouts for descriptions used in Activity 1 plus:

Handout for the auctioneer

Handout for the student who is trying to sell an object

Handout for the students who are going to be “the audience”

Handout for the teacher:

Rubrics for oral assessment 

Organization:

Several choices are possible: students can create their Art object individually or in pairs. When the Art auction takes place, you will need a student who conducts it and the rest of the students will take turns to sell their objects and bid for others’ objects.

Number of sessions:

This will depend on the number of students and the number of objects but you will need at least 3 sessions (one for the creation process, another one to let students prepare their roles for the auction and the last one for the real auction).

During the auction you can assess students' oral performance by using the handout "Rubrics for oral assessment". If you choose to do this, students should take turns so that all of them act as either the auctioneer or the person who wants to sell his/her object.

Skills:

Listening, speaking and spoken interaction, writing

I hope these activities will be useful for you. I reckon we have a true challenge ahead and our students will be better equipped for their future if we foster creativity, collaboration and critical thinking in our classrooms.