TIE 2

The voicethread lesson was a definite learning experience. For my third grade lesson, I taught an introductory lesson on ecosystems. My lesson was the best of the semester and my students were all engaged. I had several pictures of ecosystems in my voicethread. On the first slide, the students were to circle two organisms that competed for resources by doodling their responses. The second was for the students to name one fact about the food chain in the ecosystem picture. The last slide had a picture of an ecosystem and the students had to predict what would happen to the ecosystem if a hurricane hit the area. The students responded verbally to this slide.



The typed responses and the doodling were the most successful. For the verbal responses, students would hesitate a lot more and many times, we had to start over and re-record them. The only thing I would do differently is for the verbal responses, I would have the students write their answers to the prompt. Then they would be able to read the responses. This should help to alleviate their fears or going "blank" when asked the question with the microphone in front of them.
You can view our voicethread here.



For an extension to the lesson, I gave students a sheet with an empty aquarium and asked them to construct an ecosystem in it. I have included one of my student's creations below.

Questions for my peers:
How can I combine this lesson on ecosystems with another content area such as math?
Other than having the students write their responses before verbally recording them, do you have another suggestion for encouraging students to not go blank or be hesitant when being recorded?


Responses to my peers:
Margaret
Carrie
Jena

Working on ecosystem before using voicethread:

TIE 1

Yesterday, we uploaded all the identities to the Voicethread that will be used for our lesson. We started on our planning documents, (Blooms and Pedagogical Implications) and lesson plan.  You can view our storyboard. Our TIE lesson is a science lesson introducing ecosystems to our third graders. We hope you all enjoy our lesson!

Voice Thread

Life Coping Skills 101

My group consists of me, Alexa, Kenley, and Carrie.  We created our first Voice Thread using pictures.  We learned, after a few errors, how to invite each other to a VT and how to load pictures and post comments.  Since the theme is "Life Coping Skills 101", we decided to use pictures of dogs and a baby because seeing them warms our heart and makes us smile.  You can view our VT here.
As we learn more about VT and google docs, I am sure I will find ways to integrate this into my classroom.  I can see that it would be something that the students would love to do because they always enjoy anything with technology.  I know the students would love to be able to publish their work and share their VT sites with their families.  They could even send the link to their family members who live far away to share their learning experiences with them.

Technology Integration Experience (TIE) Thoughts

I watched a voice thread about Anoles.  The student showed pictures and gave a lot of information about them such as where they lived and what they ate.  I think it would be fun for the students to each choose and animal and have them do the research on it and make their own voice thread with the information.  The other voice thread I watched showed math strategies.  This would be very helpful for students to comment and place other strategies for solving the same problem.  Students watching it could benefit from all the different strategies.
I have informed my CT about the TIE lesson and you can read my letter to her here.