Rachel

http://voicethread.com/share/5626931/

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I have been excited about this project since I found out what a voicethread was. From watching the examples I couldn’t wait to get started, literally. For one of my lesson plans earlier this semester, I had my students create a voicethread in groups, but of coarse I needed to create one as an example for them to see how it works. It was about the sun telling the class all about itself: how big it is, what it is made of, everything that 3rd graders learn about the sun. My class was then to make a voicethread for each of the planets in our solar system to be displayed to the class. It goes beyond simply writing a story, it gets kids excited to write because they know they will be able to bring their story to life.

The sun voicethread was my test run of the system. It took me a while to figure out how everything works, but overall I feel as though the voicethread is a user friendly tool that I could defiantly see myself using in the classroom! One of the main problems that I had was getting my photos onto the site. I discovered that you can upload anything that ends in .jpeg and that you can make anything end in .jpeg by simply typing it under the items name. I simply scanned my drawings into the computer and transformed them into a .jpeg document. I did the same with the information slides at the beginning with which I created in powerpoint and then screenshot, drug to my desktop, and cropped, and made into a .jpeg document to upload.

One thing that I wanted to do was to add words to the very last slide, but I could only figure out how to write, not type. Also, I could not figure out how to delete a recording once I had saved it. How I solved this problem was to start a whole new story (this was with my sun test run voicethread). After I had already recorded everything for this voicethread, I realized that to make it so that each person was to have their face show when they were individually talking, I needed to have recorded each person separate. This will be good to know in the future for keeping track of student participation in the video; however, I feel that the slight lag between each person speaking is somewhat distracting. Overall, if it is possible to have everyone follow along with their part and speak in one line, the story is told more smoothly.