Teaching with Technology

Just found a moment to finally reflect on the Voicethread that I set up with our Year Four Children.   The idea was to write cinquains based on pictures.  The other children from around the world would upload their cinquains based upon the same pictures.   This would allow lots of discussion about the poetry etc and provide some interesting stimuli.

The project worked out better  than expected thanks to Keamac in New Zealand.   The children all really seem to have enjoyed the project and I’m really impressed with the quality of the work.

Lessons Learnt

• Voicethread is an excellent tool for teaching and publishing poetry
• Revisiting the thread to listen to others contributions embeds the teaching points far more effectively than any other method I’ve come across.
• It might be a good idea to make a slide that outlined the structure of the poetry and gave an example so that it could be used at the start of a lesson.
• Well worth doing – simple with maximum results.

http://voicethread.com/share/137938/

Our year 4 children have been working on adverts for different subjects at school.   They’ve used Animoto’s free 30sec option.   Here’s the music result.

Here is some work I did yesterday with some Year 4’s on writing cinqains.   Really simple to get them recorded onto Voicethread at the end of the lesson.

I’m going to try online and see if any other children from around the world want to write their own and then upload them to the same time.

To have a look follow the link, comments appreciated.

http://voicethread.com/share/137938/

Found on the Animoto website that you can get free access to full length movies if you send them an e-mail and keep them updated.   I just got the code to let 140 children use it.

Seems worth it!

Came across this great site on another blog www.animoto.com