Tie Blog 2

My voice thread experience is now complete. As mentioned in my Tie Blog 1, the lesson that I taught, "Show Me the Energy" is a Project Wild lesson, and I used it to introduce my second graders to ..."The Food Chain".  Slide 1 of my voice thread captures the snack that I brought in for the students to eat. I start by asking them if they have eaten any sunshine today.  I get an emphatic, no!  As they were eating the bagel with cream cheese, apple slice and orange juice, I asked them to think about where that snack came from. In slide 2 I have replicated a graph from Project Wild in which there are different categories of places where the snacks may have originated, i.e. store, factory, farm, sun, and so on.  Students in the slide are taking 1 snack item at a time and placing a tag on the graph to indicate where they think the snack came from.

 The rest of the lesson is teaching them that animals (including humans) are not able to make their own food, but plants are; and that plants produce food by utilizing energy from the sun.  I teach them that our bodies need this energy to live and grow and play. With this understanding students can begin to understand that energy passes from one living creature to another and this passing of energy represents what we call the food chain. So, now the students know that they did eat sunshine today!

One thing that worked well in putting together the voice thread was mainly the interaction with the students; they not only enjoyed the lesson, but they thought it was fun to be videotaped, and three or four of them got to have their voices recorded and they thought that was fun as well.

 One thing that I would do differently with voice thread is that I would not be so afraid of it.  I kind of wish that this class had of been separate from field basing because with field basing (and I will speak only for myself) I was so busy with so many other projects that I did not have the time to "play around" and learn all the little nuances that are a necessary prerequisite to feeling really confident in what I was supposed to create.  As it turns out, it is really not that difficult, and actually kind of fun!!

                                                  Questions for my peers: 

·        Any suggestions on how best to apply voice thread technology as a teaching tool in the general classroom setting?

·        Do you think voice thread is more useful for one grade level over another, i.e. in the lower elementary grades k-3, or the higher elementary grades of 4-6?

·        Do you think voice thread would be a good collaborative activity, for example, all of the same grade levels (or even mixed grade levels) in one school doing a project together? 

I have thoroughly enjoyed being a PST at Zavala Elementary School.  I learned a lot from my CT and especially from my second graders; I am going to miss them!!