Monday, April 16, 2012

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:


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4 comments:

  1. Kourtney RacicotApril 24, 2012 at 7:19 AM

    In response to your second question.... You could always warm them up. Already be talking about ecosystems so that when you have them discuss theirs they are just extending on what they already know.

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  2. Miss DurhamMay 2, 2012 at 1:00 PM

    Bonnie, I think ya'll did a great job on your voicethread. I think that using the doodling tool was perfect for this lesson!

    I also had a little trouble with the students not wanting to speak up when I was recording there comments. The only advice I could give is to just encourage them to speak up and to not shy away from the microphone. It is definitely tricky because they are gung ho and then the minute you push record they clam up. I think the more exposure they have the more comfortable they will become!!

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  3. Dr ElwoodMay 3, 2012 at 2:23 PM

    Hi, Bonnie,

    Good VoiceThread and blog posts overall. Having them write out their responses is akin to the "have them write out the team choice response before sending a person from the group to the computers to record" instruction I gave a few times in the workshop. It is also comparable to writing the storyboard and script before creating a multimedia component.

    Your VoiceThread was not actually embedded into the blog. Review your notes or look for the VoiceThread tutorial (in "browse) related to embed code.

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  4. ACaceresMay 7, 2012 at 3:43 PM

    I thought your use of the Voicethread was really great. I think that I would like to try it myself. The students were able to interact as a group and with the Voicethread. The doodle tool made it more hands on which seamed work really well.

    In the beginning of my project, I had some of the same problems with the students speaking up on the microphone. I ended up coming up with the idea of having them show me how loud they had to speak before it was recorded.

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