Voicethread

Joyce Valenza and I were just discussing the joint project our schools worked on using voicethread. This project started off as part of a Spanish class for high school students at Joyce's school. These students planned and composed myths in Spanish which they then produced using voicethread. A great deal of planning and work went into the myths, but I wasn't there throughout the entire project so I will focus on what we did at the El Salvador end of things.

Once the myths had been published the 4th grade students at the Academia Britanica Cuscatleca then had the chance to listen to the presentations, discuss them in small groups and plan paired responses to them. They were asked to prepare positive comments that were focussed on the storyline, the pictures chosen to depict the different events in the stories and also to include a short comment on how the presentation might have been improved upon. This took place after a great deal of work in Literacy lessons on media and stories so the students had a fairly good idea of what to focus on. It is also important to remember that these are 9-10 year olds commenting on the work of high school students. How often does that happen. The students were particularly thrilled with being encouraged to do this in their native language-Spanish which was a real rarity for an activity in Literacy lessons, normally conducted exclusively in English. The 4th graders, soon to be 5th graders are hooked and we are hoping to run a follow up to this project at one point in the upcoming school year possibly with the same group of students. During sy07/08 the ABC secondary school will begin its initial work on voicethread projects.