Sharing the Addiction

In my last week in my job as ICT advisor, I had some time free and so offered to do anything in classes that teachers wanted. Stu put his hand up and asked if I could spend a session with his class while he worked with podcasters as part of his action research project. I was quite keen to get into a classroom again and, of course, I couldn’t help but try an ICT tool that I have been mucking around with for awhile - VoiceThread. It turned out that the session time was during maths and I could get the laptop pod so I decided to put together a problem solving VoiceThread and give it a go. Generally, it went really well but there were some issues as well so I would adjust the activity if doing it again. Here is a summary of my thinking after the session:

What went well

• The problems were aimed at the right level and I think it was definitely worth the effort of popping them into Comic Life to ‘jazz them up’ before exporting them as images and uploading to VoiceThread.
• I had previously set up 10 identities called ‘Group One’ etc on my account and this meant I could have the children working in groups of three using one of the identities.
• I was able to be logged on to 10 different laptops on my one account and we could even all add to the same VoiceThread slide at the same time using the different identities (I was trying to stretch VoiceThread to the max and it coped well).
• I had embedded the same VoiceThread on 10 different pages of a wiki so that everyone could work off their own copy in their groups. This worked extremely well.
• The children were extremely motivated to use VoiceThread and many even asked if they would be able to set up their own accounts at home.
• Some children persevered with working out problems for almost a full half hour and showed higher level thinking skills.

What could be improved

• The children were told they needed to work out the answers to problems before being able to record but many were so keen to get onto VoiceThread they rushed the problem solving just so they could record. This meant that many of the answers were not well thought out. Next time, I think I would have a paper version of the problems and the children would have to show me they had worked to figure out an answer before being able to get a laptop to record their strategies.
• Some children recorded silly comments just to listen to them back and have a laugh. Even though they deleted them, this wasted time. By having the paper version as I said above, I think this would go some way to resolving this issue. I would also lay down some ground rules at the start and point out that anyone not following these rules would be working all the problems out on paper and not using the laptops at all.
• There was too much background noise in the recordings. I might try to control the noise levels more or have the recording area somewhere a little quieter.
• I didn’t know how to make the doodle tool stay solid so it kept fading out making it hard for the kids to show all their working in time. I know now that you click on the big white circle in the middle of the Doodle tool circles so this would make things much easier next time!
• I couldn’t seem to upload any images for identities or otherwise when I was at the school. I think this is something to do with the school firewall so it is a good thing I got it all set up the night before. I did try bringing a picture across from my Flickr account and this worked fine so I would advise teachers to have all their images banked there for the kids to use as a workaround.

I did really enjoy working with the kids and still think it was a very worthwhile activity. Anyone can use this VoiceThread and add their own working out strategies so feel free to do so! Many of the problems still have not been solved correctly. Stu has also blogged about the session in his class blog which you can also go and read.

Tags: maths, VoiceThread