Material Detail

This lesson plan would be good for a novice user of VoiceThread to build upon for use in the classroom.  VoiceThread is an excellent tool for digital storytelling and this lesson plan is written clearly enough for other teachers to follow.  I recently created a demonstration VoiceThread lesson on Moodle for a professional development course I am teaching this summer and this lesson plan would be helpful for teachers. 

Technical Remarks:

This lesson plan addresses a real and significant problem that has definite real world use and performance. The standards are clearly written. The evaluation is thorough with a rubric, however the rubric is not included nor is there a breakdown of what the different parts of the rubric would include. The lesson has a lot of elements of motivation as I’m assuming they get to chose what they write about, that gives freedom of expression to the child. Then, like it is mentioned in the lesson, the students are motivated to create their “best work” for others to see in an online story that they have the power to control and bring to life. This is a really great way to get students excited about writing!

Creating a practice story as a group so that the students can get a feel for Voicethreads is really great and makes sure that all students are able to be successful. A suggestion for scaffolding would be to first show a story that the teacher made to show the students what their aim is and to get them excited. Then the teacher can demo how everything works before having the students give it a shot.

The actual method section of the lesson doesn’t describe a lot of different medias or formats that the concepts can be taught, but the concepts are very clear and a teacher could incorporate their own ideas on how to ensure all students have the skills to create a good piece of writing.

I am not sure what a voicethread is yet, but I am impressed with the overall premise of this lesson. Basically, as I understand it, the young students (grades 3 to 5) will write their own stories in which they will practice several different English language skills. The technology piece is making the story digital and then sharing it with friend and family via the web. Some thoughts to make this lesson more UDL-friendly include: Showing examples and possibly making comparisons of different types of digital stories. (Are their other tools besides voice threads that might be more useful to some students?) Also, as the students are in the pre-writing process (reviewing story elements, story mapping, writing an example story as a class) it seems there is room for alternate technologies in each of these stages. The lesson involves interaction on many levels; peer to peer in the classroom and online as they share and comment on their stories, and peer to instructor in the classroom. I think there may be room for peer to content interaction online if they take the time to explore good examples of voice thread stories. Thanks for sharing this lesson! I am really curious about voicethreads because I have my Spanish students create children’s books on paper and would love to have them practice recording their voices and sharing their work digitally!

Technical Remarks: