EDIM 508 u05a1 Creativity Outside of the Classroom

Students want to share the content they create with their peers – locally and globally. Share an online resource or application that facilitates connections and sharing within and/or beyond the classroom.

This is an immense task as there are many possible Web 2.0 applications through which students can communicate with their peers. They can include the social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace on which students can be content creators. I especially like the use of glogs as a way to both promote creativity and comment netiquette. But since our project was on developing glogs this unit, I thought it rather boring and mundane to talk about them in another blog. However, I do think they are powerful communication tools which I cannot wait to use with my students in September. Blogs, wikis and forums are also fairly typical, although they are widely used by a great number of students. SlideShare and Flickr and great ways for students to create and share digital images, but again fairly typical. YouTube and TeacherTube are great avenues for both educators and students to share their created videos. Although when on these sites you have to be weary of being ‘rickrolled’ as I was when looking for videos to add to my glog!!

So what application to choose to discuss in this blog? It has to be an application that is not too common but it has to an application that is just as useful and user friendly as those application mentioned above. Traditional classrooms are changing; today classrooms are not confined to a room within four walls. The use of Web 2.0 applications have allowed the classroom to expand and become more global in nature. According to the Horizon Report: 2009 K-12 Edition, “[t]raditionally, a learning environment has been a physical space, but the idea of what constitutes a learning environment is changing. The “spaces” where students learn are becoming more community-driven, interdisciplinary, and supported by technologies that engage virtual communication and collaboration” (p. 6). This is exactly what my chose application allows students to do. I have chosen to share the VoiceThread.

According to the information on the VoiceThread homepage:

A VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images,
documents, and videos and allows people to navigate pages and leave comments in
5 ways - using voice (with a mic or telephone), text, audio file, or video (via
a webcam). Share a VoiceThread with friends, students, and colleagues for them
to record comments too.

Users can doodle while commenting, use multiple identities, and pick which comments are shown through moderation. VoiceThreads can even be embedded to show and receive comments on other websites and exported to MP3 players or DVDs to play as archival movies.

The VoiceThreads that I viewed were authored by a wide variety of age groups from a young child who posted a scanned drawing of a dragon to a senior citizen sharing photographs of their life. Comments were also left by all people of all ages and from all areas of the globe. There is a K-12 version of VoiceThread that allows for a secure area where your students can load their digital content and leave comments.

I see there being many different possibilities for VoiceThread in my classroom. These include:

• As an alternative to traditional class presentations. This would give an opportunity for students who are hesitant to present in front of a class to showcase their talents.
• As an alternative to traditional classroom discussion. It allows for all students to have equal opportunity to comment. It would also allow students to have time to develop an argument or collect their ideas before sharing them with the class.
• A science problem of the week could be posted here and students could work collaboratively to solve it.
• It could serve as a place to share and critique ideas for science fair projects and other design labs.
• It could be used as a ‘contest’ type site where partial images of famous scientists or lab equipment could be posted and students work collaboratively to provide the correct answer.
• It could be used as a ‘live’ discussion forum where students could voice their opinion on such discussion topics as - What does it mean to be a scientist? Does the scientific model hold true today? What has been the greatest scientific discovery of all times? Do you have any questions that remain unanswered after today’s lesson?

Some capacities of VoiceThread are available free, although the annual fee for a teacher and 100 of their students is only $60 or there is a school fee of $1/student. I think it is a very worthwhile investment for teachers of all subjects and grade levels. I now know where my noon supervision money will be earmarked for September.

References

Johnson, L., Levine, A., Smith, R., and Smythe, T. (2009). The 2009 Horizon Report: K-12 Edition. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.

VoiceThread. (2009). About. Retrieved July 7, 2009 from http://voicethread.com/about/