Voice Thread Reflection

Voice thread was a tool that I am very glad to have learned about.  I feel as if there are a plethora of ways that I could incorporate this tool into my classrooms, but especially more so if I had an older population for students.  As you all know, I did my voice thread project by using our class’s special person book.  Each student was special person for a day and all of the other students drew pictures about them and repeated the sentences we made up about them after asking a series of questions.  We gathered all of the other student’s pictures and sent them home with the special person of the day, but their picture of themselves eventually gets put into a class book that they all get to take home.  This book includes actual pictures of the students, their self-portrait, and the sentences about them.  I decided to take the pictures they drew of themselves and recorded the sentences we wrote as a class to make my voice thread.  I thought this would make a cool idea to publish so we could add a link onto Mr. F’s website and parents/ grandparents/ or whoever could go look at it.  (Unfortunately, this means I will eventually be getting rid of all your comments).

I felt that the actual process of making the voice thread was pretty painless.  It was very straight forward and an easy application to use.  This is why I feel that if I had an older student population I could really incorporate it with story telling, publishing a good piece of writing, and collaborative projects.  As it stands, my first graders just wouldn’t be able to get on there and use that tool like a third or fourth grader would be able to.  I do think I could have incorporated my students into the voice thread by using their own voices to say the sentences, but that would have been something we did when we were writing and rehearsing them at the beginning of the year.  I don’t think they would be able to go back, now a month later, and remember what we wrote (considering that the majority of them cannot read it).

The thing I don’t really like about voice thread is that it feels kind of bland to me.  I wish that there were an element of music that could be added along with the pictures.  I also felt that when did try to upload a slideshow with music to give it a little more pizzazz, the program was a bit jerky and difficult to make it all run in the right order.  I did enjoy the experience because I felt like it was another way to meet the (7^th?) goal by including community/family by adding it to the website, but I still feel that anything I did with my primary class would be more teacher directed than I would like.