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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Google docs issues

Google docs seems to be having some issues. One document in particular seems to not open

This has happened in a slightly different way before a couple of days ago. I will need to spend some time trying to find why this happens.

Yet more voicethread hearts

This project continues.

We had a long break part way through – 2 weeks with field studies and October break. Despite this, the kids got back up to speed quite quickly. We aren’t at the end of the project yet, but there are still some opportunities for some observations:

When using the blogs, the students were not as familiar with them as I had expected. I think mostly they had not used these this year and new students didn’t have these. This meant that some steps took a lot more time. If students aren’t going to use blogs much, then maybe this stp isn’t needed in the process.

The sharing part of it is about to start. I think this part of formative assessment is one of the most likely productive aspects and so we will see what this yields.

Some students had network access problems. This was quickly fixed but meant that a fair bit of instructional time was spent tech trouble shooting rather that teaching and learning.

Adding a heart diagram into the thread was helpful to focus attention and to improve accuracy. This should be encouraged.

Having students work alone meant that some students less confident with tech or problem solving made very slow progress and needed a lot of one on one attention. I was concerned about how much of my time was spent on technical issues.

The total time to complete this project is more than I had hoped, and it isn’t finished yet. Hopefully there is payback if the skills get used again sometime soon – maybe I should mail their other teachers with a done sample.

More on voicethread hearts

This project has been continuing. Here are a few observations:

What went well:

• The system and logins all worked and the students could access and make the projects.
• The students seemed to enjoy the work and were well engaged with it.
• The pictures look good and the product looked professional quickly – they were proud of it.
• Talking was fun for them, as was hearing their own voices

What was more difficult:

• When the network didn’t work, the project didn’t. Then the whole thing was counterproductive.
• Some students struggled with the multiple steps involved.
• It took several lessons to get a product – let alone evaluate it.
• The time taken by students was very variable.
• The students didn’t make effective use of the screencasts for the most part.

These points need reflection, but I will leave that for now.

The next part will be to get some useful peer evaluation happening.