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: