Extra, Extra! The journalist has just arrived to town! Don't miss a second of it!

Hi bloggers! I'm Alba García and this week I've been the journalist! My job this week is to document how our week doing the task has been and also recommend a blog from the class and an educational blog, so here you have it!

This week we had to make an animated video in which we would summarize what we have learned so far in the course School Organization and Educational Resources. At first we were a bit worried as we had never done a video of those characteristics, but we decided to take it as a new challenge and became very excited about it. There is always a first time for everything, so we had to achieve our best and demonstrate to ourselves that we could do anything, even if we had never done it before.

On Monday in class our teacher, Linda, told us two Web 2.0 tools in which we could do the videos. She said that one of them was a bit more challenging than the other, so we decided to face the complete challenge and make it a case of all or nothing. Once we were facing something completely new, why not try to push ourselves as far as possible and try to make our best? In life you shouldn't be content with doing what requires the less effort. On the contrary, you must always try new things which will help you show everyone, but mainly yourself, that you are capable of doing new things and doing them great!

At the beginning of the week, once we knew what the new task would be like, Anthea Clemente (the facilitator) told us to make each one of us an outline with what we considered we had learned not only with the tasks, but with the subject in general. We then met on Tuesday and did a brainstorm on the blackboard with all our ideas and suggestions for the video and, once everything was clear, we went ahead with the video.

At first it took as a while to know how Moovly, the web 2.0 tool we used, worked and to see all the options it offered us, but we soon understood it. We decided together how we would structure the video and the colours we would use for the different backgrounds. As we decided to divide the video in three sections which we would then link with the TPACK model, we decided to use the same colour in the section's background as in its corresponding circle of the TPACK model, as you can see in the video you can find in the Star's post. We thought that in that way it would be more visual and the contents in each of the sections would be linked more easily with the TPACK model.

We distributed the work in a way that we all were working. While some of us were doing the video, others looked for the photos we wanted to include and others searched for the song. Probably, the worse aspect of looking for the song and photos was that they had to have Creative Commons License, which was particularly difficult for the song as we couldn't find one we liked for the video. Because of that, it took us a long time to find one. We first looked for the song in Jamendo, a website were you can find music free of CopyRight, but as we couldn't find one that really convinced us we thought of SoundCloud, a website where people from all around the world upload their own songs and remixes of known songs. However, we didn't know if SoundCloud's music had Creative Commons License, so we got in the official website of Creative Commons and found a list of some places where we could find music with CCL and....... SoundCloud was in that list!!!! Having our problem solved, we decided to use a remix of Sublime's amazing "What I Got".

As the video wasn't finished yet, we finished it along the week and met on Sunday to finish details such as including voices in the video, the song, doing the "to conclude"  part of the video and including the credits. We tried to do the intro of the video singing what we had written in "Hey Brother"'s rythm, and after recording ourselves thousands of times until it didn't sound too loud or too bad, we finally got some decent recordings of what we wanted to include. BUT when we attatched the audios to the video we sadly realized that it was too slow for the pace of the video and we had to forget about that as it didn't match the images. Nevertheless, we were VERY happy to use the remix of "What I Got" as it is quite a cheerful song that engages you from the first second it is played. Besides, it looked perfect with out little boy from the video!

Then the day of the contest came, and after watching all the groups' videos (which I had to say were incredibly good in general under our point of view) each group had to vote the others as in Eurovision. Watching the facilitators of each group, who were the spokespeople, telling the group's votes as if they really were in Eurovision was quite fun and also something we had never thought of doing!

Moving on to the second part of my role, I would like to recommend you Seven UP!'s blog. I really like the distribution and contents of the blog. Stitch's GIF is a fun way to welcome visitors which instantly puts you in a good mood. Apart from being a good looking blog, it is perfectly structured in a way that it is very easy to find the post which you are looking for, either searching for it by task, role or topic. As for their posts, they document very well what they do and present it in an attractive way that engages the reader. Keep up the good work guys!

To finish with, I would like to recommend you Educalandia, an educational website where parents and teachers can find various resources and children can find educational games and interactive pages to practice what they have learned at school. Furthermore, it is very well structured as at the top it shows a menu where you can go to the Home, a page destinated for students, a Blog, a page on Resources and another one containing educational games. Besides, you can also search for what you want by topic or even by educational level, something which can solve many problems at the same time as it quickens research at the website. I hope you find my recommendation useful!