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10th Grade Child Development from Andrea Holtry

Description

This project was a collaboration of the high school students in four Child Development classes, illustrating many of the problems facing children today. I think it's a great example of what can be done with VoiceThread. They listened to other students' projects and made comments. This tool enabled students of ALL ability levels to participate and contribute.

Benefits to high-school students

• VoiceThread notes: Students record their thoughts and ideas in a format that can be viewed again and shared with friends, parents and peers anywhere in the world.
• Students learn to research on-line and organize information gathered into useful messages.
• Students learn to use online applications and tools for networking.
• Because students record their presentations, they practice oral reports with less apprehension than they would have in front of a live audience. This allows them to ease into public speaking while still honing their oral-reporting skills.

Process/Assignment

I introduced the project with a mini-lesson on Advocacy. Then the students identified problems that concerned them, gathered information from various sources, and then wrote the scripts for their VoiceThreads. They took turns narrating because we only had one headset. When all the projects were completed, the students chose several VoiceThreads to listen to and make comments.

The objective for this assignment was for the the students to be able to analyze current issues in health and safety affecting children at each stage of child development, and to advocate for improvement in the wellbeing of children.

Challenges or setbacks

The VoiceThread format is extremely easy to learn and use. Unfortunately, another easy part of the project was brainstorming the topics. Children of all ages face enormous challenges in today's world.

The hardest part was implementing the project with all of the students in four different classes with limited tools. It would have been much better if the students could have narrated their comments also. Keeping track of the sources of the information and the images was difficult.

Tools

The next time I implement this project, I'd like to use Noodle Tools for the Works Cited and Creative Commons search for the images.

Tips

I would chunk the topics into separate VoiceThreads of related areas. What I liked the most was the 100% engagement of all of my students in this project. The next time I implement this project, I'd like to use the students' images for their comments. Although they liked! the anonymity, I think the project would be more meaningful if their faces or possibly first names could be used.

Variations

I would like to see this Voice Thread used for collaboration between schools. In addition, the most successful images/narrations were the ones that the students uploaded their own images. For instance, one student had visited an orphanage over the Winter Break and she had taken a photo from her trip and narrated her own experiences.

The VoiceThread