I cannot adequately express how important connections and collaboration between colleagues is to discovering new things and developing new ideas. If we all found or were provided more time to share… hmmm????
I discovered voicethread.com and the software Comic Life in my EDT 532 class recently and had the immediate opportunity to share these items with a colleague. Beginning next year he will be teaching English at another high school in our district and has been assigned and ESL class. We’ve been discussing ways to integrate technology with these students.
Many teachers in our district use Microsoft’s Photostory (a free download) to create photo essays. While these assignments are similar to what’s created using Voicethread, they lack the publication and collaboration that is inherent in Voicethread. This communication and collaboration, while great in all classes, seemed perfect for my colleague’s ESL students.
In addition, I shared with him the program Comic Life, a software application that easily enables the user to make comic books and save them as images or html. He immediately downloaded a trial of the software and went to work. He has an HP tablet PC with the program InkArt. It was awesome to see him create his own ‘crayon’ drawings for his comic book. His ESL students will have access to these tablet PC’s as well. I’m excited for them.
As we spoke he clicked the ‘classroom’ link on the Voicethread website and it opened an entirely new feature of Voicethread that I had yet to discover. ed.voicethread.com provides a host of other features to use voicethread in an appropriate and controlled environment.
Isn’t sharing wonderful?
