domingo, 28 de febrero de 2016

Organising my Resources

Hello everyone! I came here now to talk to you about Organising tools. As I have told you the last entry, I have participated in a bank of resources by using Pinterest with my mates and creating a board. Nevertheless I have decided to use another tool for organising my webpages different to Pinterest: Symbaloo

Why Symbaloo? My teachers taught me how to use the tool when I was in first grade at the University and I instantly liked it. I always taught it is a very visual tool, intuitive and neat And also very colorful so it can be used with our students and learn them how to create a bank of webpages useful for their suties. If you have curiosity and you want to take a look, here you have my CLIL webmix: 



You can also find other webmixes by using the search option, so you can create your own one but also benefit from the boards that other people have created and posted.

For all of you that do not know Symbaloo, it is an organising tool by which you can create webmixes. A webmix is a page with many cells in which you can create small images that are a link to a webpage. This images are called tiles and you can create your own tiles by adding a picture or letters or you can search for the tiles (I have done so for the social media tiles). In addition, you can classify the tiles and make groups so all the tiles about the same topic can be grouped and easily identified.

If you liked Symbaloo you can post a comment. Thanks!

A Bank of Common Knowledge: Pinterest

Good afternoon readers! Today I would like to explain you my first contact with a wide known social media: Pinterest. It is weird but I have never used this webpage until our TIC teacher told us it was a good idea for creating educative boards. I have heard about pinterest before, but I was not very sure of what the social media could offer for educational purposes. If you do not know Pinterest I recommend you to take a visit: www.pinterest.com


If you want to add me my account has my name: Mara Domínguez. Our teacher has created a board for all called "Open CLIL" in where all the partners that are taking the Master's are adding CLIL resources.

Pinterest offers you the possibility of creating boards, which are kind of pages in which you can add pines; links to pages, videos, pictures, resources... Moreover, Pinterest let you save all the pines other people have posted so you can have all the resources you like. You can create your own boards or ask for permission to be added to other boards.

Pinterest has resulted a very useful tool that I never taught it could be used for enriching my methodologies and techniques about CLIL. But do not worry if you would like to access to some of the resources, in the next entry I have included a Symbaloo link where you can find a resume of many pages.

Thanks for reading me and see you on Pinterest!

sábado, 27 de febrero de 2016

A Creative Commons License

Hello Everybody! I hope you liked my last entries, today I would like to talk you about the new Creative Commons button I have included on my blog (You can find it on the bottom part). After doing so I will like to share with you some reflections that made me take the decission of including it.

The license I have chosen for my blog was Creative Commons for many reasons that I would like to explain now.

What does your license allow others to do with your CLIL e-materials?
The first thing that made me chose Creative Commons instead of any other tools is the fact that it is a very well-known license, respected by many people around the world so I could have the security that all my work is well protected. The first thing I had to decide was if I wanted my material to be of public domain or to have it with copyright. I prefer my materials to be public since we are all living in a world where communication is easier than ever and helping others is enriching our society. I would like teachers from around the world to see or use my material if they can find them useful. That’s why I have chosen Creative Commons, it is a way to show my work and at the same time allow other people to use it.


What are good ways to motivate our students to use Creative Commons material and attribute properly?
The first we must do with our students is to explain them what creative property means so they can understand at first what they are protecting. Once we have explained this, it is the time to give them examples so they can identify with people whose creative property was stolen by others without giving them proper credit. We can make an example in class, a simulation, so they can fully understand what it means. The best way of motivating them to use it is to try to make them aware of how important is creative property and that one day they could be the person whose property has been stolen.

I hope you liked my reflections!

domingo, 21 de febrero de 2016

Learning by Twittering

Hello! Did you ever hear about Twitter? It is one of the most powerful social media today and it is being used for many influent personalities, including teachers and other educational experts. My experience in learning by twittering started recently, but I'm finding it absolutely enrichment.

Do you want to follow me? Just add me: @maradominguezgo


Learning by twittering is relatively new for me but I have discovered it can be a really useful media for educational purposes. By twitter you can keep in touch with teachers from all the world and realise about many conferences, talks and programmes. I follow some educational accounts and also my peers accounts by which I also get so much information.

Since we are taking the Master's Degree we use a hastag for writing comments which is: . There we comment about CLIL but not only about this, also about other approaches or interesting topics for Education.

Now I would like to show some examples of the educational tweets I've been posting through these days but you can see more by entering to my account.




Thanks for reading me and see you on Twitter!



My PLE and PLN for CLIL

Hello dear readers. Some of you may know what PLE and PLN mean, but just in case I will briefly explain what are these acronyms. PLE means Personal Learning Environment and it is every tool or source from which you take information about a topic, in my case CLIL. By the other side, PLN means Personal Learning Network and it refers to all the ways by which you share the knowledge you have obtained about the topic.

Picture taken from pixabay.com


As I told you my PLN and PLE have been created for CLIL, so first I will explain you what I found positive about the tool and then my previous experience with the approach.

My PLE and my PLN created with the tool Mindomo. Before starting to create the Mindmap I decided to write all the ideas I had about the topic on a paper so I could think over my CLIL experiences so far. Focusing on the tool before analysing my CLIL environment, I would say it was the first time I used the Mindomo but I found it very easy and intuitive. I sooner learned how to use it and I will choose it in the future for other possible Mindmaps.

Coming back to CLIL I will explain how I have acquired knowledge about CLIL:
-Where have you gained that knowledge? My first steps in CLIL started when I was studying my degree in the University so the people who taught me about CLIL were my teachers. Nowadays the Master's Degree I'm taking at the Rey Juan Carlos is being a high learning source . I keep my CLIL knowledge up by using many Internet tools such as Google, by which I can read and investigate all the new CLIL aspects and theories. Also using Youtube by which I've just watched a Kay Bentley video last week so I can learn about CLIL at every moment. All the tools I've included helped me to expand my knowledge about the approach.
-My CLIL connections are wide, even though my specific training about the approach is not as wide as I would like, I'm on it. My English level is not at a proficient level but I have the English Certificate in Advanced English by Cambridge so I'm an advanced user of the language. Anyway, all my peers through these years and also my job partners have contributed to expand mi CLIL environment and network a lot, not only my teachers or the instruction, as well as I contributed to expand theirs through many tools such as whatsapp, facebook, twitter...
-About organising information the main tool I use is Dropbox. By this page I use to share and post many information about CLIL lesson plans, activities, information and more with my job partners. Also my blog is going to be another tool for posting information about CLIL through the following months.
I would like to end up by saying that I have never though before about my Personal Learning Environment and Network untill this moment and I realised I had learned from more places than I expected. It is completely positive to see all the elements that helped you and that will contribute to extend your information and training on this method so important to our future.
Thank you for reading me.

My 3,2,1 Introduction with Storyjumper

Hi everyone! The first task I had was to introduce myself by creating a 321 Introduction so everybody could know me better. My presentation was created with a tool called Storyjumper and you can see it here: 
(This is me)
Apart from what I told you there, I'm an English Teacher in a school in Madrid and I'm studying a Master's Degree in Bilingual Education at the moment. These are my first steps to crate an e-portfolio.
Now I would like to give you my opinion about the tool I have used to see if it could be suitable for your future educational projects.


What I liked the most about Storyjumper is the possibiliy of creating your own book with such interesting elements. You can add your own pictures as I did (Even editing some of them with the help of photoshop) or you can create characters and put them in a scene. You can also change the background using a picture of the programme or creating your own background. After that you have dialogue options to write the story and also props, which are small pictures or cliparts to decorate and bring life to your presentation (I loved the props, you can use the ones that the programme offers or create your own props). It is quite easy to learn how to use it and the possibilities go as far as you can imagine. After having created it you can save it and it will be like your own real book. In this case I decided to use my own and pixabay pictures to tell you facts about me but it could be easily used for creating stories for kids. The possibilities for Primary Education are wide and you can use many topics or ideas to work through the tool.
The only thing I would change is that you cannot choose or create a background for the cover (You can only use colours but not special pictures) and also de fact that the variety of speech bubbles you can use is not very wide. Apart from that, I really enjoyed creating my presentation with Storyjumper and I would use it again to create a story with my children (I am currently teaching children from 5 to 7 years old).
I hope you will enjoy my presentation and you will know me better!

Welcome!




Welcome everyone! This blog called "The lighting of a fire" was created for educational purposes. It will be dedicated to show you all my progress and steps during this long way which is teaching in general and also teaching through ICT. I have chosen this name because few years ago I read a quote which said "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire" by William Butler and it impressed me much. I hope you will find my blog interesting and full of inspiration.



Thanks for reading me!