I must admit that I had never even heard of VoiceThread before the demo we saw in our Technology Integration class. My first reaction was that it was pretty slick, but I didn’t take much time to consider how it could be used in a classroom. I also wasn’t sure how I would use it since I only have classes for 30 minutes at a time. I wanted to do something different and not necessarily literacy-related, and during a discussion of it with a colleague who is pretty techno-savvy, it occurred to me to use our Outdoor Classroom as the basis for a project. My colleague told me that our ALP teacher (same thing as Target) has a teacher son in North Carolina who uses it, and our ALP teacher also happens to be one of those in charge of our Outdoor Classroom. When I mentioned it to her, she was excited that this might be a great “PR” tool for the Classroom, and could even be put on our Web site or sent to the corporate sponsors who were so vital to the creation of the Classroom.
So, this project ultimately became a sort of collaboration between our ALP teacher and me. She and some of her students wrote the scripts we used, and I chose the students who would speak and took pictures of the Classroom. For speakers, I chose a few of the kids who do our morning broadcast, because they’re used to speaking into microphones and know how to speak more slowly and clearly. I gave each of them a script to take home and practice, and while they did that, I played around with VoiceThread so that I’d be comfortable when it was time to record. I found VoiceThread to be surprisingly easy to use and fairly intuitive (with the help of the tutorials). The only real frustration I had was trying to figure out if and how I could fix the order of the comments. The information flowed better if read in a certain way, and I also wanted our ALP teacher’s comments to go last. After trying different things, I just gave up and let the comments happen in whatever order VoiceThread dictated. Fortunately, the comment I wanted to be first did occur first, but the rest were pretty random.
Now that I’ve used VoiceThread, I can see some interesting uses for it in the classroom, and I’m anxious to introduce it to our teachers. The two that I’ve already shown it to seemed excited to try it, and I think that even the technology-intimidated teachers might be willing to give it a go. Also, the fact that educators can get the basic version for free is even more appealing. And now, I have an example to show them! If you’d like to see my final project, just click on the link below and take a look.
http://voicethread.com/share/606263/
So, this project ultimately became a sort of collaboration between our ALP teacher and me. She and some of her students wrote the scripts we used, and I chose the students who would speak and took pictures of the Classroom. For speakers, I chose a few of the kids who do our morning broadcast, because they’re used to speaking into microphones and know how to speak more slowly and clearly. I gave each of them a script to take home and practice, and while they did that, I played around with VoiceThread so that I’d be comfortable when it was time to record. I found VoiceThread to be surprisingly easy to use and fairly intuitive (with the help of the tutorials). The only real frustration I had was trying to figure out if and how I could fix the order of the comments. The information flowed better if read in a certain way, and I also wanted our ALP teacher’s comments to go last. After trying different things, I just gave up and let the comments happen in whatever order VoiceThread dictated. Fortunately, the comment I wanted to be first did occur first, but the rest were pretty random.
Now that I’ve used VoiceThread, I can see some interesting uses for it in the classroom, and I’m anxious to introduce it to our teachers. The two that I’ve already shown it to seemed excited to try it, and I think that even the technology-intimidated teachers might be willing to give it a go. Also, the fact that educators can get the basic version for free is even more appealing. And now, I have an example to show them! If you’d like to see my final project, just click on the link below and take a look.
http://voicethread.com/share/606263/
The collaboration is the key to our success (media specialists) my dear, long distance colleague. It is so difficult to get some teachers to communicate their simplest needs, and having the opportunity to work with others in the building must have been great! Your project was awesome!!
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