Voice Thread is a free Web 2.0 tool available to teachers and students. Known as a “group audio blog,” Voicethread allows users to record text and audio comments about uploaded images. Voicethread has two distinct advantages for classrooms: communicating and collaborating. Students and teachers are no longer limited by geographical or time constraints.
I am a middle school computer teacher and tech specialist. Voice Thread is very helpful to me. It allows me to visually describe and explain the concepts I am trying to convey (especially to the teachersJ). I have done some research on Voice Thread and found an article, Using Voicethread for Self-Assessment , a teacher discusses how they used Voice Thread to solicit as many responses as possible from images presented to students. The teacher was extremely impressed with the responses but was surprised in the amount of feedback that was received from the classes. The students took the feedback and used the suggestions to change their panels. Voice Thread encourages collaboration which is a higher order thinking skill. Voice Thread also gave the students the opportunity to either verbally communicate or use written text to provide their feedback. When students are given multiple forms of responding, the teacher is better equipped to evaluate the student’s assessment of the skill set they have presented. This article has shown me some great ideas that can be incorporated with Voice Thread, and shows the actual steps and thinking that went into producing the Voice Thread.
I have presented a Voice Thread showing my students how to create a document and save the document in the correct folders. This Voice Thread could easily be adapted to the teachers in my school. More often than not, they create documents and save them then they have no idea were the document is or if they saved it at all. I hope the students benefit from this tutorial and I hope the teachers archive the presentation on their desktops J to view my presentation click here.
Herb,
ReplyDeleteI, too, like the idea you mentioned from the article you found. Students need more than one way to be assessed, whether it be written or verbal. Voicethread is a good way to do this.
This is a great way to show how VoiceThread can be used in the lower elementary grades. This could be used as a formative or summative assessment to show understanding of the opposite concept. The pictures could be larger for a better visual. This would make better use of the white space provided. I love that in addition to the obvious opposite concept, the student adds some opinions about the relationships of the pictures. This adds elementary level authenticity to the project.
ReplyDeleteI love that you actually got a child to record comments. It makes it very personal. I also really liked your topic, it is definately geared towards Elementary students.I agree with Debbie that if the pictures were a little bit bigger it would make this more appealing. Of course, in a real world setting this will definately be enhanced because it will have a multitude of comments. Great job.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed listening to the child's responses, too. It would be neat if you created a title slide to do your introduction rather than on the first slide with student commentary. It would help "set the stage." If your VT was used in a real elementary classroom, it would be really neat to compare the different comments that the students make. It's a great tool to use as assessment, but it would be a lot of fun, too. It's so hard to predict what children that age will say!
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