Thank you to George Haines @ VoiceThread for reading my Tweets and suggesting I blog about the projects my students create. Here are some of them in a nutshell.
VoiceThread: Conversations in the CloudAfter meeting Viktoriia from Ukraine via the ePals website in 2014 and chatting via their email exchange, we decided to branch out. She did not have Internet in her classroom but was willing to invite her students into her home to use her DSL connection to create a VoiceThread project and type their comments. Talk about dedication! |
So, I started a free account and had my students create a project on our temperate forest ecosystem in Missouri. I chose this to parallel our curriculum units on the human impact on nature and informational writing. During the course of this I also became acquainted with Dhanam from India who also produced a project about their rainforest ecosystem. After communicating separately with them via ePals we then moved to a group chat in Google Hangout. The time difference as well as connectivity issues prohibited a live video chat to solve the issues we were experiencing when trying to access each other's projects. I used ScreencastOMatic to make a tutorial and sent the uploaded YouTube video to them. Within a day, we had our very own Group in VoiceThread and all of our students could view and comment on each other's work. My classroom was a flurry of excitement as students rolled in each morning itching to check to see if they'd received any "comments" back from their now dubbed Global Buddies. Since then we've added our friends in Ghana to the VoiceThread group and await their first contribution. My foreign friends and I all enjoy the authentic practice our students get writing and speaking English while supporting our curriculum and widening our appreciation of the world's cultures. We've done projects on civil rights, currency, cuisine and holidays.
Kidblog
Kidblog is a fantastic teacher-managed space for blogging. While it used to be free, it's still a great value at $29 a year per teacher. You can set up student accounts in a snap and each one gets their own personal blog. Because they're all linked to one another in your "class" they can easily view and comment on one another's threads. There's a wide array of privacy controls, including the option for teacher approval before posts are made public. I've used this quite a bit and at one point had students from different continents all matched up in a four way Pen Pal thread. I really like the ability to embed multimedia projects so it provides a one stop venue for sharing and getting feedback on student projects from authentic audiences. Give it a try today for free for 30 days!
Google Drive: Document Sharing and Collaboration
I'm just going to say that I LOVE Google! Whether you're using a single account created for your class or your school is full blown GAFE, it is an amazing space for online collaboration. Students can work with one another on projects across oceans by taking turns revising or editing and commenting on one another's work. The possibilities for asynchronous communication (that often is necessary due to time differences) are endless. Students can use mobile devices to upload photos to a shared folder from landmarks in their home towns or create presentations comparing and contrasting their respective holiday traditions. They can co-author stories or critique one another's informational writing. I've moved every one of my partnerships away from ePals into a community "Global Buddy Project" shared folder that is now chock full of artifacts of our mutual learning.
WeVideo: Google Chrome Extension
This is a great piggyback off of Google Drive. My third grade students taught themselves how to use the provided templates to string together a collection of videos uploaded by our friends around the world. The result was a Global Weather Report with six nationalities represented reporting their location, temperature and precipitation on a given day. SO cool and the possibilities are endless. Throw in a green screen and the creativity of children and any run of the mill research project can become something AMAZING.
Google Hangouts/Skype
Both are great for those times that you can line up your schedules with buddy classes. One tip...remember that we use Daylight Savings Time! Once I was mortified to miss a chat with friends from Ghana because I forgot about this and our six hour difference became a seven hour one. (Christopher was more than understanding even though he had connected his modem to his car battery to be sure we didn't have any issues related to his sporadic electric service. Still kicking myself for that one!) Anyhow, I've found that Skype has been more reliable for overseas connections but I love the capability in Hangouts to "Share" my screen. That comes in handy when I want to teach a colleague how to use a new online tool remotely. I use Hangouts also for a perpetual group chat in which the six of us ask questions, check in on projects and share local happenings that our students may find interesting. My kids were floored when Jose Luis chimed in that their local volcano was erupting, but they could still have school since the air quality was still "yellow." It made the dreary drizzle we'd been so down about seem a little less....well just less.
Screencasting/YouTube
For my friends who have slow Internet connections or who are not confident enough in their spoken English to have live "meets" with me, I send them video tutorials. When we run into roadblocks and can't seem to connect via Drive or VoiceThread, but my written instructions just aren't doing the trick, I record the solution and shoot the uploaded screencast to them. Usually the turnaround is a day or two and we are back on track with our project. I like ScreencastOMatic for my PC and Screencastify for my Chromebook. Screencasts are also great for use with my own students. When I teach them a new online tool, I record my instruction. Then if they were absent or forget a function, they can revisit the video in Drive to refresh their memory. Several of them enjoy showing the tutorials to parents who report becoming more "techie" as a result.
That's all....folks?
This is just a fraction of what tools are out there to help enrich the online connections you can make with your students. Do you have a favorite? Please share in a comment or tweet @elfvdb. I'll give it whirl and feature our successes in my next blog.
Thanks for reading!
Thanks for reading!