Voicethread – what a mess!

Had the first session of the voicethread activity with the hearts today. There were a bunch of problems, the main one of which was that the lesson was reduced to 20 minutes and this was not enough to get the students accessing the site. Other issues incuded:

• Distributing passwords – not easy on paper – how to do this better?
• New students – one student had no knowledge of school email account and no VT account set up – I need to figure how to add this.
• One student who had an old VT account from last year couldn’t use it because it had reached a 3 voicethread limit.
• Getting photos out of flickr wasn’t intuitive.

All in all there was no science teaching done and only limited progress at getting some things logged in. It would have been better if I had not tried to start this project with limited time. Lessons like this need a backup.

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Another wiki

I am going to start up a new wiki to support review of the IGCSE Physics syllabus.

PBworks makes this easy to set up and I have made base pages for the sections of the syllabus covered so far. Because we are near the beginning this has been split into 6 sections, so this will require people to work in groups on this task, which is not really easy.

Some criteria for success:

• Things get put up in a small time – not too much time wasted on tech or password issues
• Things put up are good – clearly connected to the syllabus but adding something
• Things get used.

We shall see…