Tuesday, October 27, 2009

My voice thread...

is still a work in progress! Check out steps 1, 2 and 5 of how to do the addition strategy les sommes partielles.

Isa and I have been talking about how voice threads could be very useful in second language learning. By using a voice thread you can still work through the steps of the pre-writing, writing and revising BUT because the finished product is oral you won't (and can't!) get caught up in the spelling and grammar mistakes.

I decided to try a project that I would like to do with my students. I chose do explain an addition strategy: the partial sums method.

My steps:
1. I wrote out each step of the strategy (folling an example from the Student Reference Book of Everyday Math).
2. I took pictures of the steps and uploaded them to my voicethred.
3. Using a microphone I recorded my explanation of each step and using the pen wrote on top of the pictures to help explain each step.

This project would be great for my students because it would help them with their mathematical reasoning skills - they need to explain their thought process.

One frustrating point: as you can see not all of my steps are included in my voice thread. I tried SEVERAL times to upload my images. I even left the site open over night. (FYI, I had also compressed my images before trying to upload them so the images wouldn't be too big). So, you only have the first slide, steps 1 and 2 and the final step. Any thought out there on how to fix this?

One question: After I recorded my voice and saved it I found I wanted to make a change (use the pen to write on top of the picture) but I couldn't seem to figure out how to delete my previous recording after saving it...thoughts?

6 comments:

  1. C'est formidable! Quelle bonne idee, Molly?
    Janice

    ReplyDelete
  2. Merci Janice! Et bien fait avec le francais :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. I am so going to use your idea Molly! I have a kiddo who swears to me that he prefers partial products multiplication over all other strategies, but he's really not independent in using it. We are going to do this, and I think it will cement the process for him (as well as provide a visual explanation for my future students). I love it when I'm excited to jump right in and do something. Hurray!

    ReplyDelete
  4. What a wonderful application of Voicethread, Molly! I hope you can get the bugs figured out. I had the same problem uploading my pictures at school so I did it at home: I uploaded all my pictures at once in less than 20 seconds! To be able to add missing slides, I'd suggest uploading the missing pictures once you're in the editing mode of your Voicethread. That should let you add and move slides around. Also, check out this Voicethread done by one of Kany's students a couple of years ago: http://voicethread.com/share/31403/ It's a great step-by-step how to do a subtraction with borrowing. I can't wait to see yours all done!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Wow! This is great. Maybe you could also use something like to show parents how to do this strategy. I think most of them are used to adding the "old" way and when they sit down to help their kids, they don't know what to do.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Great idea, Molly! Were you going to have the students explain their thought processes as a part of the VoiceThread? This would be a great way for them to do their homework and to show how they got the answer to a specific problem. It seems like this would be especially helpful in working on constructed response problems, which are so difficult for our students.

    On a separate note, it sounds like you have used Photo Story before so I'm hoping you can help me. There is a piece of music that I REALLY want to add to my story, but I can't figure out how to get it off the CD in my computer or off a playlist I've created online. Do you know how to do this?

    ReplyDelete