#WEEK 4/ Translator/ "Exploring tasks with Digitals for Primary School Children."

"I'm Charlotte and I'm in charge of the Translator this week, so I'm going bring up the five core terms related to this activity."

For this week, we worked on developing a fun activity for children to participate in, throughout which they could work on different aspects of their lives. After investigation and a careful selection, we decided upon an activity titled “Fuzzy Feelings”, with which we would work on emotional expression and positive feedback, two of the key terms to be explained shortly.

The activity consisted of creating short interactive images of an animal or person, in which the child recorded themselves saying a short message about another classmate. This message could be for a birthday, Valentine’s day, a special occasion or any other day that the child might desire to send the message. The only specification about this activity was that the child must say something nice and positive about the receiver, so as to promote feelings of happiness and school friendships.

Because of the description I have just given, I decided that the five key terms that we could see developed throughout the entirety of the activity were the following:

Source: Self-made, with the use of https://www.canva.com/

Let us now speak more indepthly about each of these terms:

-Firstly, we can find emotional expression. Emotional expression refers to one's ability to express verbally or nonverbally their feelings and attitudes towards different people, subjects or ideas, and can be expressed intentionally or unintentionally.

For this activity, we decided to work on the verbal and intentional expression of positive feedback and feelings between children, a subject that tends to present difficulties for these young students. As this term is the core component of our activity, it is clear that it is also a key term used in its development.

-Moving on, we can find positive feedback, which also played a big part in this activity. Positive feedback is a process in which a person receives input that impulses them to remain the same, being applied in various different contexts. The contrary of this term would be negative feedback, in which a person receives input from another that leads them to stop or change a behaviour or action that they had previously been demonstrating.

In this activity, we worked with positive feedback throughout the happy messages that the children sent to others. Here, both the sender and the receiver have positive feedback, as the sender receives positive feedback from the teacher for their work, and the receiver gets the message, saying something nice about them.

-Thirdly, we can find secret friends. Secret friends are an arrangement used, mainly for situations such as Christmas, in which different people are assigned at random another for whom they will have to buy a nice gift, say something nice or do something helpful for them. A key component of this process is the secret, as each person does not know who will be performing the activity for them, only being able to guess once the activity is finished.

For this activity, secret friends play an important role, as it serves as a way of randomly selecting which child will send a nice message to another, avoiding children sending messages only to their friends. This process helps with the creation and reaffirmation of friendships in the classroom, as well as being useful for thinking about the positive traits present in everyone.

-After this, we can point out interactive images, the tools used for the task. Interactive images are photos in which there is another component present aside from the image, this being an audio, text or any other options available, depending on what tool is used to produce them. They serve as a way of removing the static element of an image without transforming it into a video.

As interactive images were the tool used in this activity, they played an important role in its development, being one of the key terms to discuss. For this activity, these images were present throughout the creation of bubblers, images with audios from the students in the class.

-Finally, the Bloom Taxonomy allowed us to define the key objectives of this activity and their evaluation. The Bloom Taxonomy is a hierarchical framework used to establish the main objectives of an activity, as well as the domains with which our activity works.

This framework had a great importance for this activity, as it helped us establish the main objectives of this activity, such as creation and application. Without these, it would be difficult to develop our activity.

THOSE WERE ALL THE FIVE CORE CONCEPTS!

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SPACE FOR OTHER MATTERS.

GIF retrieved 28 February, 2021 from https://weheartit.com/entry/164025190.

Finally, I would like to talk a little bit about the development of the activity. As I have mentioned before, the activity selected was “Fuzzy Feelings”, an activity that works upon emotional expression and positive feedback. With this activity we had ups and downs, finding difficulty mainly in presenting it in a way that would be fun and interactive for the students. Despite this, we did not have many issues with the task and thoroughly enjoyed its development, resulting in a positive ending for all of us.

As I established before, the format used was that of interactive images, but we also made use of the tool canva for developing our presentation about the activity. We began working on the task in a group, but once we had established the main ideas and goals we began working individually on some of the aspects, as a way to speed up the process. Whilst this option may not work for all, I believe that our team is able to work individually because of the trust we hold with our members and their adequate completion of the task. We know that our group will get the job done perfectly, asking for help when needed. Once we had finished, we revised everything to assure that we did not need to improve any aspects and added in final details.

One issue that we found was the maintenance of these students' privacy, as the interactive images are uploaded to the tool blabber. After some debate, we decided that the proper course of action was to assure that each student did not give any personal details in their audio, such as their name or age. Once again, the task was completed without issue thanks to our wonderful team.