Courtney

The REAL Story of

Diamonds and Toads

By: Courtney Lockamy

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Reflection

The voicethread technology was a little more challenging and time consuming than I had anticipated! This is not the website’s fault, but my internet was very slow, so the comment recording was a little difficult for me. I kept recording and the comment would stop about halfway through. This happened several times, but I managed to get the entire voicethread completed successfully. I thought that completing the pre-write was very helpful. By the time that I got to the voicethread portion, all I had to do was upload the pictures and record! Although it was a little challenging at first, I enjoyed learning how to use voicethread and will certainly be using it in my future classroom. I am a huge advocate for integrating technology in the classrooms and I believe the voicethread technology would very useful in upper elementary and middle grades. I intend to be a 6th grade math teacher, so I may integrate writing across my curriculum and allow my students to use voicethread to present their stories. One concern with using this technology would be that students may need a lot of guidance and assistance when using this. This guidance may take quite a bit of time, and I know that it is already difficult to cover all of the objectives! Another concern with this technology is that I would have to find a location for each student to record their story individually, because the recording would not be very good quality with many students recording in the same room. This would be very time consuming, and may be quite difficult to find various locations for students to record. One option would be to assign a group project, only requiring one voicethread for each group. Another option might be to inform the technology teacher of this tool, assign a prompt in the math classroom, and allow the students to work on the voicethread during technology class. The voicethread technology allows the students to personalize their work by commenting on the slides. I enjoyed my experience with voicethread, and look forward to using it for the first time with my own students!