For my TIE activity, I taught a lesson about 4 colonists that were influential in the forming of our nation: William Penn, John Wise, Anne Hutchinson, and Roger Williams. The primary focus of this lesson was for the students to understand how the rights and freedoms we have today were shaped by these colonists. As part of this activity, I created short documentaries for VoiceThread on each of these colonists. Following each short video, the students were presented with a critical thinking question. After the class watched the videos on VoiceThread, they were split up into groups and went to centers for each of the different colonists. In their centers, they were presented with the script from the video for their specific colonist, a glossary of new terms to help them understand new concepts, and the same question that was presented on the video. In groups, the students worked collaboratively to answer the questions, then went to the computers to respond to the questions on VoiceThread using audio or textual comments.
Although the students were actively engaged in this activity and were enthusiastic to be using the computers to post on VoiceThread, the use of the technology also posed multiple problems. First, because two of the four computers were slow, they were unable to support either the bandwidth or memory required for posting comments of VoiceThread. Although I had tested each computer to ensure that it could play the video, I had only tested comments on one. Two of the computers froze up repeated as comments were being recorded. In the end, these students had to post textual comments instead of audio comments. Second, most of the students in this class were relatively new to using technology and basic computer operations were challenging. I had to provide a large amount of support to these students, even though they had received modeling of the process and step-by-step written instructions. Finally, some groups had difficulty getting VoiceThread to accept their comments. After typing out a textual comment, they tried to press the "save comment" button and nothing would happen. In order for an activity like this to be successful, I think I would need time to conduct a mini lesson on the proper ways to use VoiceThread and take time to test each computer more fully before assigning it to students for use.
VoiceThread
Digital Blooms Taxonomy & Multiple Intelligences Activity Plan
Affordances/Pedagogical Implications Framework
Lesson Plan
Storyboard
