Saturday, February 7, 2015

The Value of VoiceThread

Recently our district purchased a district VoiceThread account, and thus there is a push for teachers to use VoiceThread with their students.  VoiceThread has some valuable features.  Students can improve communication skills by recording ideas pertaining to an image, much like students can do with PhotoStory.  What makes VoiceThread a great tool is that others can comment on the image by text, web cam or audio. Due to the fact that our district has a district account, VoiceThread projects are kept secure and are supposed to be easy to access by me.

Our district PLC devised a VoiceThread assignment with the intention of using the assignment as an opportunity for students to provide peer feedback.  As is the case for many projects, the first "go-around" left me learning what to do and what not to do in the future.

Five Things that I Learned From this Project:

1.  I should not have used this activity as their first exposure to VoiceThread.  I should have done a quick introduction to this tech tool by creating my own VoiceThread and having students comment on my project early in the learning unit. In doing this, they would have learned how to comment on another project. My mistake was that I assigned students to make a project and provide feedback all at once.  Whew, too much!

2.  They needed to SEE a demonstration. We should have started this project in the computer lab with me demonstrating on the Smart Board.  I gave students instructions for accessing the unique link for their class period, and gave them time with their devices or IPads to access the link and add pictures.  I soon learned that VoiceThread is not IPad friendly.  They have an IPad app that they are quite proud of, however, VoiceThread cannot be accessed through the web on a mobile device.  The app must be used.  This ends up being frustrating, especially in the initial stages of the project.  The program works great on a PC, but had some hiccups with IPads.  Next time I will take away the frustration and just use computers.  However, those computers must have access to a microphone, and in our building there aren't too many of those available.  Commenting was a breeze with IPads, but the creation step is best with computers.

3.  Sharing must be done right.  Even after fighting with this program for an entire week, I am not sure I quite get the best, most efficient way to access students' projects.  Even after students log into VoiceThread through the unique link for their class, they still had to share their project with me, specifically, in order for me to see their project in our group.  If you have worked with secondary students, you know that the fewer steps for students to complete an assignment, the better.  This step was repeatedly left out.  I had near 60 students completing this assignment; there was no way that I could find each student's project.

I worked around the sharing issue by having students copy the link to their project onto Edmodo.  I would recommend this step to anyone who is doing a similar assignment.   I wanted their assignments to be accessible by our buddy class in France, which is why I had them post their link.  Little did I know that having them do that step was the only way that I was able to find most of the projects.

4.  Use the tag option.  Again, when working with high school students, if there are too many steps, many steps get left out.  However, naming the projects and using the tag feature makes finding projects on VoiceThread easier.  I would suggest that they name their project Last Name_Project Title, and put that in the tag. When I look at the VoiceThread projects shared with me in my groups, I have a bunch of projects named "Les Saisons".  I have no idea whose project I am looking at until I click on the project." Ugh! What a headache.

5.  Commenting is awesome, but hard to manage.  Our project requirements consisted of having students make peer editing comments, as well as make comments in French.  What a great way to have students use their communication skills!  However, I didn't realize how hard it would be to grade students' comments.  I created a scoring guide to help me check off the comments and peer edits made by each student, by after searching through Edmodo, I found myself viewing the same projects over and over again in order to find the comments made by each student.  What a tedious (and not fun) task!  Not to mention the students who couldn't follow all of the instructions because they simply didn't understand how to comment.

There is no doubt that I will use VoiceThread again.  In fact, I am in the process of creating another project for my level 2 students!  However, I have learned from the frustrations of this project, and I know better how to make the project more successful for the students and myself.

Thursday, February 5, 2015

Tense Times with Past Tenses

One of the things that my level 2 students (and I) struggle with second semester is the usage rules for the two past tenses.  I have struggled for the best way to assess students' understanding.  For the past several years, I have attempted the same type of project, but I have been going about it all wrong.  I have never been happy with each step of this project, and the end result was never exactly what I wanted my students to show.  Finally, this year, I think I have it.

Let's take a stroll
This is a multi-step project, where students complete a different component as we learn new things.  Next week, we will start with part one.  Since we are learning vocabulary for childhood memories, we will start with our own stroll down memory lane.  Students will construct a type of "foldable" where the middle will illustrate the "lane" and the sides to the right and left will illustrate the memories.  The left side will list things that they did often at different stages of their childhood, while the right will illustrate certain memories of "one time" events at those same stages.

I created a Smart Notebook file to help instruct them for our "foldable". Here it is as a .pdf

This is how we will introduce our learning unit which focuses on childhood memories with the grammar point of past tense versus imperfect tense.  Since we are starting, we will only list activities in the infinitive form on our Memory Road.  Later, we will look at how to conjugate each of these actions, which will be part of the lesson on past tense v. imperfect tense.

Picture This
Since we will eventually be talking about our memories using VoiceThread, the students' next task will be to find pictures of themselves or that represent those memories.  Using their Google Drive, they will upload electronic versions of their images, which we will use later.

Stay tuned as we move down this "road".  I will let you know where it takes us.