Collaborative Geometry Riddles Voicethread

This is a collaborative project between my second graders and Ms. Chamberlain's first grade class. We made some geometry riddles that describe different plane and solid shapes and posted them to Voicethread. Ms. Chamberlain's class is responding to the riddles. In this lesson I used the smartboard to review attributes of geometric shapes and to build an attribute table (see lesson).

One of the fun aspects of this lesson is the independence that my students have in using technology. I know I can just give them the video camera and they will film it and check it to see if it came out clear. We lost a file when they had to upload it to the computer but with a little help they found it. I don't know if it was a good idea but I gave them my username and password for Voicethread so they could upload the video themselves. Who could imagined that they would have this level of autonomy in second grade!

Our voicethread is below:

VoiceThread Math, Project-Based Learning, and Assessment

Here is the long awaited VoiceThread math project. Feast your eyes on the splendor of the -Oh, heck! Who am I kidding? Sometimes technology projects are down and dirty and sometimes they just should be. I like the idea of leaving the glamor behind and just going for the functional.

Anyway, I'm taking a course right now on assessment and we were recently asked to complete a survey of the strengths of our current assessment system. Some of the questions ask if my assessment system:
Provides interesting, active, exciting experiences?
Examines students within the context of their natural learning environment?
Puts emphasis on student strenghts?
Treats each student as a unique human being?
Engages the student in a process of self-reflection?
The survey (from EssentialSchools.org -link no longer active) goes on and I paraphrased a bit but I realize many of the assessments we do give students do not meet any of these criteria. The assessments that come closest to approaching these are the ones I do in conjunction with technology rich lessons. The project-based lessons I have been implementing more frequently are a step in the right direction. I'm trying to use more Universal design in my lessons. I'd like to hear from other teachers implementing UD and your thoughts on assessment.

It Takes a Village

Our First Graders created a community as their summative assessment for our My Space Mapping Unit. As a class we created a list of what communities need and want. They were very creative in creating their buildings. Three students were ill and unable to create a piece at home so I improvised and they had 15 minutes to create a piece using KidSpiration. Students presented their piece (as you can see on our VoiceThread) and the next day, students created the community. They were extremely engaged, eager and collaborative as they built their community. Two students weren't able to complete their project at home, so they were responsible for road development. At the end of the VT there will be pictures of their city along with their final reflections (we'll get this done tomorrow!). Please check out their hard work. They are very proud and their buildings include everything from a bank to a mall!

Class Blog
VoiceThread

Voicethread

My ELD group worked really hard this past week to create a Voicethread. They read, summarized, and illustrated a story about a girl's adventure in trying to find her lost beagle. Take a few minutes to check out all of their hard work.... :) The link below is my classroom blog... it is the newest post. If you click on the voicethread link it will begin to play for you! Enjoy.

http://thebrainiacsinroom14.blogspot.com/

Many Irons in the Fire

This semester has been great with all the collaborative projects

and fun things I've been trying. Right now it seems like I have a lot of irons in the fire. (photo courtesy of iansand at flickr).

I've wrapped up the Fall Project with Tita Martinez at Haskin Elementary. I'll let her tell you all about it. My students have completed their Monster stories, drawings, and recreations for my project with Esmunda Talamantes at Hanson. I've got a voicethread project going with Sara Zaleski and another just among the students I have for English Language. I'm building a multimedia database to accompany StoryTown stories for second grade for a Star teacher project. I'm as busy as ever but really having a good time. I'll post links later.

On another note. I encourage everyone to nominate the Global Learner Blog as the Best Group Blog for the 2009 Edublog Awards. Follow the rules here and make the nomination from your personal blog. You can see my nomination here.

Class Blog and VoiceThread

Well, can you tell it is the end of November? Suddenly we're all posting.
Both my team members and I have already posted about our joint project. I had not yet made a blog for my class this year, so first I had to quickly put one together. Now I can share that address and you can check out our VoiceThread. As Melissa and Michelle have posted, our next steps are to have our students comment on each others pictures and write doubles addition sentences.
http://kelloggclass09-10.blogspot.com/

I'm enjoying reading what all of you have been up to.
-Lisa

VoiceThread

I am working on a collaboration project with Melissa and Michelle. We will all post the final projects soon as well as our reflections. Our students drew a monster mama and monster baby and had to tell about the number of body parts on their monsters. We decided a VoiceThread was a good way to go. I scanned in their pictures and recorded their comments individually through Audacity.
This is where I added in an extra piece. Using word, I had each student type his or her name and then choose a font and color. I used ScreenHunter to capture their names, one at a time. In VoiceThread, I can set up multiple identities to use when making comments. I created a new identity for each child by typing in their name and then selecting the picture from my computer with their name. (Obviously, you could use head shots, or drawn pictures, or others.) When I uploaded the audio file that matched each student's monster drawing, I switched from my identity to the one of that student and then commented by uploading the audio file from that student.

My Reflections and Goals for 09-10

I got kind of wordy with my reflection, so I won't say much here - you can skip right to the post in my blog. I basically reflected upon what I'd like to do in the coming year overall as a teacher, and then a few ways that the technology I've learned about over the past two days will help me accomplish those goals.

This is a good time to introduce my "professional" blog. Eventually I want to do more with the domain (like a class website, which is what it was used for last year), but for now it is for me and anyone else who wants to contribute. Working on having good content and promoting it and getting lots of input is something I hope to have happen.

The main site is howatscience.net. Again, the permalink to my GL Workshop Day 2 Reflection is here.

I will say that all of my fellow GL'ers have been a real inspiration to me so far, I can wait to collaborate with all of you over the coming years.

Reflections on the Collaborative Plant Project with

I had a really fun time with the Plant Experiment project we did with Kelly's class. My students learned a lot about plants from each other but also from Kelly's class. Her students commented on our VoiceThread and our Students commented on theirs. Kelly's students reflected very nicely and made some comparisons between our projects and theirs. This turned out to be several lessons which extended the learning opportunities from the anticipation phase through the reflection phase.
One thing I liked about VoiceThread was the ease of recording comments and deleting comments if they made a mistake. This lesson would have been better if we had done it a little earlier because it would have given more time to reflect more deeply and to do some experiments from the seed stage rather than starting with potted plants.
Kelly set up her VoiceThread in a more student and inquiry-friendly format with each student group posting on a separate VT. What made it fun was pausing the VT after her students explain their experiment and having my students record predictions about what would happen then resuming the video to check the results.
Overall a great lesson for Science Standard 1 (process of scientific inquiry) and appropriate for this age of student.

Kemp / Alsup First Grade Collaborative Plant Project

Here is the Voicethread for the Kemp / Alsup collaborative plant experiment. We look forward to sharing comments with Kelly's class. Each group created a question they wanted to pursue as well as a hypothesis. Then they designed their experiment and logged the results.

First grade collaborative plant project

First grade collaborative plant project.
Kelly Berry, Jon Fisher
Students will develop a testable research question and design an experiment to test their question. They will make careful observations of their test and control plant. Students will share their observations twice per week using VoiceThread. Students will collaborate with their distance learning partners by asking questions and making predictions via the response features of VoiceThread.

Example questions:
What happens if you cut off half of the leaves?
What happens if you cover some of the leaves with foil?
Will a plant grow without soil?
Will a plant grow upside down?

We are looking for some feedback to get our project started. What are some other questions to investigate? We would likely start with nursery pre-potted plants. Does anyone have suggestions as to the best plants to use?

Probability Bar Graph Voicethread

This is a voicethread my students have been commenting on. The process was as follows:

• Together, we filled out a 6 x 6 table showing all the possible combinations that can be rolled with two dice. We then created a bar graph showing the probability of rolling a 2, 3, 4 etc. all the way to 12. They discovered that the probability of rolling a 7 was much greater than rolling a 2 or a 12.
• Students worked in pairs to roll two dice 50 times and tally the results.
• They used the laptops to visit National Library of Virtual Manipulatives and created a bar graph showing their results.
• I screencaptured their graphs using the PrtSc/SysReq button on the computers because their wasn't a screencapture program installed on all the computers.
• I uploaded the pictures to box.net which now has a feature where you can easily edit the pictures using picnik I cropped the screenshots down to show just the graphs.
• I imported the pictures to Voicethread along with instructions on how students should comment.
• Here's the SIOP lesson plan.
  

Students are choosing to comment using voice and text. I instructed them on how to choose their own "identity" icon before commenting although sometimes they are forgetting to do so. We began this process before spring break and before the blizzard so unfortunately we didn't finish then like I had planned. After the break, we worked on it again and honestly, I am disappointed with the results. I thought my instructions were explicit enough, but my students' comments seemed really surface-level and didn't reflect the deep level of understanding I was looking for. Other comments are very stilted and are read right from their worksheet without much thought to the meaning of the words they were saying.

Finally, I had major technical problems with Voicethread. First, my mics weren't working on any of my desktops. I tested them through the control panel and they worked fine. Then in Voicethread they didn't work. Then I did a test comment as a demonstration for my class and it worked on my laptop. When we went to the desktop later to listen to it on VT, it wasn't there. Other students have reported disappearing comments. It was so frustrating and brought everything to a standstill. I would like kids to go in and continue commenting, but I am bagging it at this point. Has anyone else experienced problems with VT? Voicethread is a tool with great potential and I was excited about using it, but I am really disappointed. We have another project happening next week where students will be publishing their work as a VoiceThread. I will publish it here and let you know how it turns out.

VoiceThread in Action

Last month I posted about a live conversation I had through Classroom 2.0 about Voicethread. I have been playing around with it and trying to figure how to set it up for best usage in my classroom. I decided to go with the $10 teacher account. This lets me create identities for contributing to the voicethread without setting up individual accounts for each student. I put it to test last week as an assessment for a presentation I did on Cross Linguistic Influence for my CU Bueno master's class. Many of your colleagues are here contributing to the Voicethread (under my fish identities).
Here's how it went: After some fumbling to get my powerpoint to play the embedded videos I presented my review of a chapter we were reading. I had asked those with laptops to bring them and we were able to form five groups. I gave each group an identity (I called them fish 1, fish 2, etc. -which is what I'm thinking of using for my first grade groups). Then I logged them into Voicethread and helped them to click on the identity for their group. I showed them the different ways of commenting and let them choose. I gave out some microphones and a webcam and I set one group up with call-in minutes (fish 1). I let them choose how they wanted to respond. I circulated and helped but very little help was needed except trying to adjust microphone volume.
The Voicethread consisted of some videos of students answering questions with prompts for my colleagues to answer specific questions related to the language forms of the students or feedback mechanisms of the teacher. Overall the lesson was very well received. The interest and motivation was high and the quality of the responses were great.
Some instructional caveats: The project was very absorbing and we ended up going well over the 30 minutes allocated for discussion. In a k-12 classroom setting you would need to have a very simplified practice setting (reduced content-focus and increased practical-focus). I might have done better to include a discussion rubric if this was a graded assessment. I also would ask the groups to state their names in their comments next time.
Set up time: 10 minutes for videoing students, 20 minutes editing videos and putting subtitles, 30 minutes setting up the slideshow and creating identities. (A simplified one with just photos could have been done in 5 minutes).
Next steps: simplified practice with classroom. Perhaps just one intriguing photo and ask the students to list three descriptive words for the photo using two different means of commenting. Then, begin using it for commenting on student writing projects and other learning activities. Finally, students create their own. (Note: the way I have it set up, students have editing authority and could accidentally erase the whole Voicethread or other students' comments. I haven't figured out a way around this yet without paying the $60/yr teacher Pro account. Does anyone have some ideas how to remedy this?)
I really had fun with it. It seems like a great way to present multiple assessment options and is great for emerging writers. I think it can help foster collaboration skills in the classroom and serve as a great vehicle for project-based learning. An added benefit is that it could serve as a vehicle for metacognitive self-reflection in a student portfolio.
Anyway, here is the link to the Voicethread.

Crossposted on MrFisherGlobalLearner

Voicethread

This online media album looks like a good tool for students and teachers. It holds all sorts of media (images, video, documents) and does allow commenting in a host of ways. In this example I used audio and doodling, you can also create and comment using video with your webcam. Voicethread is educator friendly offering k12 teachers a free "pro" subscription. With the pro account you can create "entitities" for your students. You can see a great project using voicethread here. It will be a great addition to use with the smartboard.

I will be trying this out with 2nd graders later this week.