TIE 2

WOW, was this VoiceThread FUN or what!? It was definitely a learning experience for me. Every ETEC class was extremely overwhelming for me. But after sitting down, taking a deep breath, and doing this all step by step, I came to the realization that I was being way too hard on myself and this was a lot easier than the crazy person in my head was telling me.

For my 3rd graders, I chose to introduce and teach my lesson on ECOSYSTEMS! The students loved this lesson and were very engaged throughout the whole lesson. It was difficult, though, as there were not enough computers in the classroom, but we made it work and it was a success. The first slide of this VoiceThread had a picture of an ecosystem. I had the students doodle/circle and explain to me what organisms they were circling and why they were combining the two. The second slide had another picture. The students were to think of facts over the food chain. The last slide was another picture and the students were to imagine hurricanes and decide/think of what would happen to that specific picture if a hurricane hit the area. 


Here are a couple of the pictures that I used in my slides:

This was definitely a frustrating task for me, but I didn't let my frustration show because my students LOVED it.

QUESTIONS that I have:

• I have a blog that I am doing for another class and the site went down at one point and ALL of the blogs that everyone had posted VANISHED. It got me to thinking... is there anything that we can do with our VoiceThread's to ensure that nothing will be lost if the site is down? There sure is a lot of work that is put into these VoiceThreads.
• How would you suggest doing an informal assessment over Ecosystems?
• How often should a technology lesson like this be used in the classroom?

On Tuesday, February 28th, we got some things prepared for out next lesson. All of the identities were uploaded to our Voice Thread that we are going to be using for our upcoming lesson. We started on our Blooms and Pedagogical Implications documents and started creating our lesson plan. The cards for our storyboard will be completed and uploaded very soon. We've decided to do a science lesson for our third graders for our TIE lesson. We're going to be introducing ecosystems.

Life Coping Skills 101- Voice Thread

This whole Voice Thread deal is a trial an error type thing. I don't think that I'll fully understand it until I keep using it and experimenting with it. The more that I use it and practice, the better that I'll understand. It's something that you just have to play with to grasp. Our group added pictures and I added some writing and some voice in there saying "I love you" to my dog. I wasn't sure what I was doing in the process, but it's cool to see afterwards. You can view our voice thread here.

Technology Integration Experience (TIE) Thoughts

Inquiring technology into classroom teaching and learning is becoming huge in today's society. One idea that I really liked for the Voice Threads was involved with a math lesson. It's a great idea to have drawings and math problems already printed or drawn out on paper and then having the students talk you through how they got their answer. Of course, their faces are not shown in their explanations and all you can see is them showing their work along with a small explanation of their answer. Another Voice Thread that I liked was to simply show pictures of different creatures and have students verbally explain what they see. I'm anxious to get started with a Voice Thread with one of my first couple lessons to see how it plays out... :)