My First Attempt at a Voicethread Digital Story!

Being the last full week with my kindergarteners, I decided that I needed to take advantage of my time with them and try out some of the amazing classroom technologies available to teachers! This week my students and I created a Voicethread using both the mobile app and the website. Our Voicethread was a digital story featuring our persuasive writing. Here is the lesson plan that I followed: Literacy Project Lesson Plan

I first read my students I Wanna Iguana by Karen Kaufman Orloff to teach them about persuasive writing.

www.amazon.com

Once they understood the purpose of persuasive writing and how to create their own, we gave it a try! Each student wrote a sentence convincing the upcoming preschoolers why they would love kindergarten.

You will love kindergarten because you will learn how to make shapes.

After everyone's work was completed, I took a picture of each piece using my iphone. I then opened up the "create" tab in the Voicethread app, clicked the green "+" sign, and clicked "Add Media from Library".

I selected which photos I wanted to use in my digital story, and clicked "done".

The app then created a story using my pictures. To add voice comments, I called each student out into the hallway (where it was quiet) and clicked the add comment icon when the student was ready to record their voice. I made sure to click "save" after each student was done recording.

After each student recorded their voices, I could have stopped there and showed them the movie, but I wanted to get a little fancier with my work. I decided that I wanted to add in a title page, an author page, and a final closing page, but was not able to edit the order of the pages using the app. I could, however, make these changes using the Voicethread website. That night, I went home and created those three pages using Microsoft Powerpoint, and added them into my story. Using the app, we recorded comments for those pages to finish up the story!

One student has been absent so I have not been able to get her voice into the digital story yet, but I will show you have we have so far!