June
2009
The Seeds of a Good Project by Kim Cofino0
Kim’s blog explores how a teacher’s goals can be met more effectively using VoiceThread. The teacher Kim interviews is a grade 3 teacher named Rebecca who is unsure if her project is going to be successful she therefore “wanted to make sure that the technology portion of the project was manageable.” One of the teacher’s goals included “visually document the stages of growth in the life cycle of a seed.” In order for the teacher to keep track of the students learning progress she assigned students as ‘experts’ who were “responsible for different aspects of the project.” After the experiment was completed the teacher requested that several students’ work to be published as a VoiceThread online. The students were required to write their own scripts and record them.
I found this to be highly engaging because the teacher integrated numerous KLA’s into one lesson, including, English, science and technology. The teacher uses various forms of assessment throughout the experiment.
In Kim’s ‘Final Thoughts’ aspect of the blog she states how “establishing a successful and positive first experience with technology is a sure-fire way to encourage teachers, students and parents to keep building those skills and to continue using new tools to enhance learning.” I think she truly captures the essence of how important technology is in schools in this statement. The more practice teachers, students and parents have with technology the better they become at implementing it into various lessons.
-Dijana
