Today's Class

In today’s class we were introduced to a program called Voicethread. This program could enable teachers to create an interactive online presentation. The teacher could upload their PowerPoint presentation directly on this website and then add voice recordings to accompany it. This makes it easy for students to access this website and view this presentation. Not only can students view, but they can also comment or respond to a teachers question directly on the page. This makes it great to assess the students understanding of the topic. I could see this type of instruction being great if a student was absent, all they would have to do is check that day’s page. The downside to the program is the limited free membership, meaning that you could only have three free voicethreads at one time. Otherwise, you would have to pay for an advanced membership. Therefore teachers would have to weigh these sides to decide if it is worth it. I think I might try this program sometime as a guided lesson. Another possibility I am thinking about, is to create a generic topic one that I could give to a substitute to conduct an actual lesson and not a video in the event of my absence.  Overall this Voicethread program was a neat one, that I will most likely try out in my classroom.

SnowDays + Lesson Plan

So many snow days! I wanted to send out an update that I taught my technology lesson plan on Monday. It was planned for Thursday, but on Wednesday (with the impending snow storms) I changed the library reservation to Monday. I thought we would have school on Friday, but with the early dismissal on Wednesday, we still had a topic to cover before my lesson. That topic still hasn’t been covered. Anyway, let me backtrack and tell you about my lesson. My topic was Star Constellations with the main objective to explain that this is a form of navigation and that stars, even though they look close together, are sometimes great distances apart. The lesson used multiple forms of technology including Webspiration, PowerPoint, iPad Star Walk, and the internet. Webspiration was used to brainstorm the students’ prior knowledge. This was followed by a small PowerPoint with some basic information about the topic. The exciting part of this lesson was when we traveled to the library and used the iPads/computers for a web-quest. Students picked a partner and a constellation to research from my list of popular ones. Since we only had 10 iPads the class was spilt into two groups and switched to use them. The students then created a PowerPoint with their information about their star constellations. These presentations will occur whenever school reopens. Oh Snow Days.