Welcome- Introduce Yourself

Welcome to our NEW Voicethread for Educators Group! Please take a minute to say hi, what you teach, ideas for this group, maybe a VT or two, and of course, your Twitter/Plurk other Social Networking site handle that you may use.
Good luck and once again welcome.

Mark

Tags: Voicethread, educator, group

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Shirley Miller on July 12, 2010 at 11:15am

I'm Shirley, and I teach 7th grade language arts in Cupertino, CA. I've never used Voicethread, and joined this group in order to get ideas for using it in my classroom. Thank you David for the link to your dictionary, do you mind if I share it with our Spanish and French teachers? Keith, what a cool idea for using Voicethread and explaining the graphs, making comments and asking questions. I would like to figure out how to use Voicethread with google docs, so when student's are reading each other's writing they can leave messages for revision and edits. When reading and commenting on essays, I'd also like to use Voicethread. It would be sooooo much faster than typing the comments, I hope! I use twitter and I'm smillerteacher there.

Permalink Reply by David Thompson on July 12, 2010 at 11:52am

Not at all, Shirley. Please share as much as you like.

Re. Google Docs, you might be able to embed a VT in a shared doc, but I wonder if it would be easiest to have students upload documents (probably as .pdf) to a VT and receive comments and feedback that way.

Permalink Reply by Sheri on July 12, 2010 at 1:42pm

For essays, it might be easier for feedback to use the "add comments" aspect of Google Docs.

How about using voicethread to discuss current issues or a book with other classes and then students reflect about those ideas or write essays or create presentations based on the ideas, in Google Docs, which could be shared with the VT participants. A final frame in the original VT could add comments about the resulting reflections or essays.

I like Bill Campbell's ideas in another reply also.

Permalink Reply by Holley on July 12, 2010 at 11:22am

Hi, my name is Holley Stabler, and I am a 5th grade science teacher and the technology facilitator for a K-12 independent school in Boca Raton, Florida. So far my school has utlized Voicethread as an assessment for students and an avenue of creativity in their subject area. We are a bilingual school, English and Hebrew for K-12, and would like more ideas on how to incorporate VT as a language tool. One of the problems we have encountered is typing Hebrew into the text response, we haven't been able to do this. Any suggestions as to more ways to use this valuable tool, and to make it easy for my staff to use, would be appreciated.

Permalink Reply by Faith Shabat on July 12, 2010 at 5:05pm

Hi All,
I've used Voicethread with Kindergarten, 1st, 2nd graders. Here are my links: bzkids.wikispaces.com - Click on each grade on the sidebar to see their projects. My 2nd graders wrote and recorded their own poetry, and we had fellow students, and students from schools in other states comment on their poem. I love Voicethread!
Holley,
I also teach in a bilingual, English and Hebrew school. I've been advising the teachers in my school to have the conversation portion in Hebrew. You or the students can post pages that the students draw, or papers for them to translate. You can have them draw pictures and recite a story in Hebrew to go with the pictures. Let me know if you need more info. It's a powerful tool for the bilingual classroom.
Faith

Permalink Reply by Yis Pollock on July 16, 2010 at 5:18am

I also teach in a dual curriculum school. It is possible to set up all computers to type in Hebrew. I experimented at the end of the school year with VT in a Judaic Studies class. I plan on posting up a picture of the Talmud and reading it. Then I will have the students review and record it on VT themselves. Then I can go back and see how they did. I got this idea from http://techrav.blogspot.com/ who posted this on May 17. See that blog for more details.

Permalink Reply by Bill Campbell on July 12, 2010 at 11:48am

Hello, my name is Bill Campbell and I am the Academic Technology Coordinator at the Dwight-Englewood School, which is an independent preK-12 school in New Jersey, USA. That's a new title for me and, if all goes according to plan, one that will concentrate my focus on helping middle and high school teachers use technology in their classrooms and with their professional development related to technology. I'm somewhat active on Twitter (@BillCamp), and blog a little less actively at TabletTails and a Posterous blog.

I've been at D-E for a while and held various technology related roles in management, system administration, and troubleshooting areas. We have a 1:1 Tablet PC program at D-E in grades 6 through 12, and for the past couple of years, my interests have moved toward helping teachers improve teaching and learning via technology so that will be my full-time job this fall.

I taught eighth grade students in a semester elective I created last year, Collaborative Digital Media. One of the activities I did in CDM using VoiceThread asked my students to collaborate with fifth grade student volunteers. My students created a video trailer or summery of a novel read by a fifth-grade partner. Each eighth-grade student used a VT to share selected images with his fifth-grade partner in order to solicit feedback.

I like this idea of the fifth graders somewhat outsourcing the creation of a video. (The idea was inspired by the book The World is Flat and the outsourcing requirement of the Flat Classroom project). VoiceThread seems to be a good tool for this.

For next year, I'm interested in connecting my students with others outside of my school and have plenty of room in my elective's curriculum to do so as it has changed from a semester to a full-year course!

Permalink Reply by Helen Davies on July 12, 2010 at 12:36pm

Hello everybody !
I'm Helen Davies an English teacher (efl) in a French High school. I've just moved to a new school and have been battling with our computer room - VT can be tricky without microphones !
I've used VT for a few very simple projects involving my school in France and pupils in the States. My pupils really enjoyed this - although as a VT beginner I battled away with permissions/ moderation rights etc.

Looking forward to seeing Vt for educators continue !
cheers
Helen Davies

Permalink Reply by Sheri on July 12, 2010 at 1:59pm

Hello
I am Sheri Edwards, grade 8 reading teacher and grades 5-8 writing teacher in a small, rural public school in north central Washington State.

Perhaps we could create conversations within this group to connect with different levels or purposes, such as middle school group, or literature book talks on a certain book?

Twitter: http://twitter.com/grammasheri

Thanks for bringing this here...

Permalink Reply by Alexandra M. Pickett on July 12, 2010 at 2:01pm

Hi! I'm Alexandra Pickett. I teach online and use voicethread as an icebreaking activity http://voicethread.com/share/1111187/ for my master's level fully online course "intro to online teaching" at the State University of New York, University at Albany, in Albany, NY in CDIT master's program. I have been using voicethread for more than 3 years in this course.

i am also the associate director of the SUNY Learning Network (SLN) and give leadership and direction to the SLN online faculty development and instructional design aspects of the program. Exploring the instructional potential of various technologies to enhance instruction, interaction, and feedback is what i do and part of who i am.

http://prezi.com/yyzcr9_btox6/teaching-learning-in-the-cloud/ - for more info.

i use twitter and diigo. a lot. : ) (which i prefer over plurk and delicious.)

Permalink Reply by Michelle Pacansky-Brock on July 12, 2010 at 6:55pm

Hi Alexandra. We met a couple of years back when we co-presented at Sloan-C in Orlando. How are you? Will you be at the ET4Online conference next week? If so, see you there!
Michelle Pacansky-Brock

Permalink Reply by Maryanne Burgos on July 19, 2010 at 3:15pm

Hi Alexandra,
Thanks for sharing your intro Voice Thread. I used a similar idea for the first mod of my SUNYAB course, Blogs, Wikis and Podcasts. I used Wordle for most of my slides, but I really like yours. What did you use to create them?