I am an avid Voicethread fan. Even though I only used it for one year in my history class, I found it engaging to students and really made me think where my lessons were going. So I'll outline below how I used it and how I should have used Voicethread which I just found out at ISTE yesterday.

My students were taught to work in 3's. Not just in groups, but in Voicethread, they were asked to comment 3 times, on 3 slides, and to collaborate by combining three separate concepts into 1. I'll elaborate. I created something called a PSI or Primary Source Investigation. The students were asked to figure out how the three primary sources related to each other. The whole concept was to take them to a higher level of thinking. So we did several things like the American Indians, Wild Bill Hickock and the Carlyle Scholl in Pennsylvania to help them figure out how assimilation worked or didn't. We tried the 3 dictators from WWII in order to find similarities and differences. I monitored the comments and had just one rule: every comment needed to add something new to the discussion. If it did not, it would not be accepted. Moderation helped with that rule.

Now with the new iPad app and the html management available to teachers, I can image a teacher visiting a museum and creating the tour in Voicethread. Using just an iPhone, a teacher could walk around the museum and comment on how what he/she was seeing relates to the curriculum. Once at school, students can experience the field trip through the teacher's eyes, answer probing questions and interact with the teachers footsteps through the museum rather than a canned virtual tour.

Today I learned how one school district is using Voicethread as a student portfolio system. If you have never worked with Voicethread before, it is a beautiful archival option as well because it accepts MS Word Documents as well as Excel Spreadsheets and of course PowerPoint. You can also upload movies. Any photo, including screen shots works too. The ability of the teacher to leave Voicecomments is tremendous. And now when uploading student accounts, a Graduation Date option is available for easy tracking of school year and their progress. Each year, students can upload their best work with included teacher comments

If you teach foreign language you've already heard of the magic of Rosetta Stone. I've envisioned Voicethread as a custom Rosetta Stone - like environment for students if a teacher is willing to put in the time to create the exercises. Rosetta Stone harnesses it's power through visuals and voice, I think Voicethread has that down pat.

If you have any interesting uses for Voicethread in the classroom, leave me a comment.

|

We have the capability to instantaneously acquire a student's understanding of nearly anything taught. Here at ISTE 2011, vendors abound with clickers, forms, surveys, exit tickets, computer graded writing, peer assessment, class exchanges and so many other options to grade on the spot. I was particularly fascinated by the Virginia SOL tests this year. Being computerized, these high stakes tests are administered en masse and results delivered within days. The flurry of teachers who flocked to get their results surprised me. I always understood assessment to be what the student had achieved. But teachers see these tests as a measure of what they achieved. The results are not provided to the individual students until much later and have very little meaning to them except a pass/no pass message.

Ok, I may have my formative and summative assessments confused you say? I'm not the only one. Teachers are frequently calling their end of the week quizzes as formative and the on-going project as summative. And they love the instantaneous gradebook fillers that come from the computerized world. Spreadsheets are easy to import. In our district we use these online tests as formative sometimes and summative other times. Not only are students confused as to why they are assessed every step of the way, but there is no rhyme or reason for the assessment in their eyes. Based on observations, students see these online tests as a collaborative game to beat a score. Teachers do use them occasionally to pad the gradebook too. Either way, I think as adults we would resent our employers evaluating us on 5 or more skill areas every 15 minutes, especially on a Monday. There are a lot of student response systems here at ISTE. I personally think they are wonderful uses of technology. I see them as a method to deliver and focus instruction, not really an assessment device. So with that perspective, they are excellent advances in the classroom. But technology doesn't always have to be instantaneous to be an advancement. We should look at the other alternatives available to us in a digital world. I like to think of it in medieval terms as the "masterpiece." Remember that in order to learn a trade in the middle ages there were steps along the way such as apprentice, journeyman and then master. In order to obtain master status, a final culminating project defined their very best efforts. How does technology aid in this type of assessment. Students can produce many masterpieces over the period of their school career. These are collected digitally and represent the student's attained level of mastery. I'm advocating cloud based digital portfolios but with more student control. It is only fair to notify students when they will be assessed and to give them the best optimum chance to succeed in that assessment. Students should be the owners of their portfolio, given lessons on good portfolio presentations and rubrics for what to include. As they progress and move from school to school, the portfolio should follow and evolve as technology changes. Let them put their best foot forward and take the time to show us something outstanding.

|