Designing a visual metaphor

Hello again!
I am back with this new post and I hope you find it interesting! So, I am going to tell you.

Do you remember my last post about my open educational digital project? I needed it not only for learning about different tools and to know how to create it, but because this time I have a new challenge: to design an online visual metaphor of how I was going to turn my open educational digital project into a collaborative one.
I have been reading information that our instructor provided us, and thank to this information I have been ready to do this post (if you want to take a look to these pages I leave below the links).
First of all, I want to explain a little about the cooperative and collaborative work because I want to clarify this terms because it is important to distinguish them and also to a better understanding of the challenge.

• Collaborative learning: a group of students work together to investigate or create a project.
• Cooperative learning: the students are distributed in small groups to make a structured activity.

These types of learning have a lot of benefits such as learn how to work with different people, because through this type of learning the student has to work with all types of people so they learn to respect and to solve problems together: another benefit is that cooperative and collaborative learning helps to the development of social skills because the students are interacting all the time. Another benefit is that the students have a significant learning because they have opportunities to participate. all of these benefits are onle a few among all.

And, coming to the point, what is a collaborative project on the web?
A collaborative project is an open project to teachers and students or every person interested on taking part of the project, which is created and shared through social networks in order to give our personal opinion or ideas to form a final product.

As we see, the goal in all of types of learning that I have read is an effectiv communication. To know how to transmit your own ideas in a clearly way, to understand other people, to debate about different issues, or solve problems are the result of an effective communication. And the best place to learn it is the school, so the teachers have a very important task: to collaborate among us creating and sharing our own point of view, ideas and so on in order to give our pupils a good final product.

After clarificating the ideas about what collaborative work is, I am going to name some ideas (that our instructor give us and they seem me very interesting to make an idea of what we can do with our projects) about how to turn an educational project into a collaborative one:

• Collaboration within the classroom through cooperative learning.
• Collaboration out of the cassroom connecting with the real world.
• Collaboration back to the classroom involving external agents.

With all of these ideas I started to create my visual metaphor. To do it I used Canva. I also took a look of other applications to make images such us Smore or Piktochart but I decided to do it with Canva. Here I leave you my definitive visual metaphor.

Respectall life. Go Vegan. de Beatriz Diaz

If you remember my project, it was about the healthy lifestyle, this was the main aim to achieve.
In each lesson, I have created a different activity in order create the final project at the end of all challenges. All the activities are going to help the pupils to do this final activity, because they work first of all in an individual way in order to know how to give good feedback to their pairs, later by pairs and at the end by groups, and of course the final activity in groups.
This final activity is about creating a classroom magazine.
The students have to creat a magazine about healthy life with all of that they have learned all along the different activities. Each group of students will be in charge of one topic included in the magazine. There are five different topics:

1. Food section
2. Sport section
3. Advisements section
4. Properties of the food section
5. Sickness section

If you want to know something more about each topic you can take a look to this entry.

The students have to work by groups but their decisions not only affect to their group but also the whole class because the final product is responsibility of all. They have to collaborate, give good feedbacks to other people or groups, they have to solve problems and so on. They have to apply what they have learned all along the project both, contents and skills.

Reflection:
I was very lost at the beginning because I knew nothing about what a visual metaphor or a collaborative project was, so these days I have been reading the pages our instructor gave us to make a good idea of what I had to do. There have been some pages that have seemed me especially interesting: La comunicación docente-alumno, Concept to classroom and La magia de los proyectos colaborativos en la red;  I have read other documents but these three have helped me a lot to do this post. When I had a good idea of what I had to do I was looking another very interesting page on Blogger and this is Stop and learn English I recommend you all to take a look of this blog because there you can find lots of resources.
When I was ready to start I was looking the recommended online tools our instructor gave us and finally I decided to do it with Canva as I said before, because is the application that I like the most.
While I was doing the visual metaphor I changed the title of my project, because the one I put when I made the previous challenge was so serious from my point of view, so I thought another title in order to do it more attractive. I hope you like it more than the other one!
Sincerely, doing this challenge I have had some problems, because, as I said before I had no idea, I had lots of problems because I did not know a lot about creating a poster with Canva... But is when you fail when you learn the most; and this has been my case: I had problems to create my visual metaphor but finally here I am trying to achieve the goal of this challenge.

Hope you like it! I will write very soon with another task!