Tamara

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Gingercurls & The Three Chipmunks

By: Tamara Day

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Although this is not my first time using VoiceThread, I feel like this is a type of technology that takes time to get used to and to perfect. Since I am a perfectionist, especially when hearing myself talk, sometimes I found it difficult to get each slideshow the way that I wanted it. As for my classroom, I think this is a great tool to use for my students, however, if I did permit my students to use this website, I would definitely have to give them a step-by-step tutorial on how to use it properly because if I am a student in college and it takes me a while to learn how to use a VoiceThread, then I would definitely have to give my eight to ten-year old students a lesson on how to use it. On the plus side, in my opinion, VoiceThread is a great tool to introduce various forms of technology to my students. Using this website, my students will not only know how to embed documents into both a wiki and VoiceThread itself, but it also gives my elementary students practice with their reading skills. If I were to teach the lower elementary age students, giving them the opportunity to record themselves reading a passage from a book is a great way to let them hear themselves and let them see what they personally need to __work__ on when reading, and it would be a great assessment tool for me as the teacher to give feedback to both my students and their parents on what areas need improving such as pronunciation of words, pausing between words and the end of sentences, inflection of the voice when asking a question, etc., but I would also have to keep in mind that the lower elementary age students would need more guidance when actually going through the process of recording themselves and learning how to speak in a microphone on a laptop or using a headset with a microphone. For the upper elementary age students, VoiceThread would be a good tool to use when taking them through the writing process with the imaginative narrative or fractured fairy tale, and then publishing their finished product to a VoiceThread; however, it would probably more appropriate for students in middle school to actually write a story and publish it to this website because by the sixth grade, the students would be more familiar with how to use a webcam or how to use the microphone from the webcam.