Voicethread

In class this week, we spent a lot of time working with our groups on Voicethread. It was a little frustrating at times, but overall it worked very well! It was really helpful to work on it in class with Louis's help. If we had had to do that project on our own, I think the frustration level would have been much higher.

I was thinking about my classroom and how I could use Voicethread, and I came up with some potential ideas. As I mentioned last week, my seventh graders are reading The Outsiders right now. We could create "scrapbooks" about the characters. We could also explore how the themes of the book (ex. gangs) exist in the world today. The article I read for the first review mentioned creating a digital story about heroes in our lives. This would also be applicable to the novel. After discussing Pony, Johnny, and Dally as "heroes", the students could create Voicethread stories about their "heroes".

Whenever we learn a new tool in this program, I always try to think about how I could apply it to my four math classes. Digital storytelling doesn't seem to lend itself as naturally to math as it does to literature. I could have the students create stories explaining concepts.

I enjoyed the "We Didn't Start the Fire" video. I think that would be neat to do something like that with a history class! It actually helped me to understand some of the phrases in the song that I hadn't been able to identify before =)