Are you searching for a way to share documents, presentations, slideshows, or a series of photos or images with your students?
Then Voice Thread is the free Web 2.0 tool for you and your students (teachers can register for a free education account).
Voice Thread allows you and your students to add audio, video, and text as part of conversations concerning science or math content.
Comments can be added using a pre-recorded audio file, microphone, call from a phone, or webcam and microphone.
A Voice Thread allows group conversations to be collected and shared in one place, from anywhere in the world. This is great when your class is collaborating on a project with students in another time zone or other locations around the world.
This week I've been working with our librarian and our Grade 3 teachers to prepare our students for a skype call with the poet Kenn Nesbitt on Friday. The students are working on the How We Express Ourselves unit of inqury which is focusing on poetry and song.
Today I had my 3rd class of Pre-Kindergarteners. I decided today I would approach the whole lesson as a series of questions. Rather than explain to the students what they would be doing (my first approach) or model what they would be doing (my second approach), I tried to encourage them to explore the tools and when I noticed students who were not using different colours I asked them: "Do you know how to change the colour of the lines?" If the answer was yes, I let them get on with it assuming they would change colour if they wanted to. If the answer was no I asked, "Do you want to know how to change the colour of the lines?", if the answer was no I let them continue in their own way, if the answer was yes I showed them how to do it. In the same way if I noticed students who were drawing lots of similar shapes I simply asked, "Do you know any other shapes?"