Mark Carls’ Blog

Well, anyone who knows me, knows I was floored with Voicethread.com from the first moment I saw it. Almost as much as Twitter!

Rick Weinberg showed Voicethread to a Tech Connect group he was working with back in December, and I couldn’t join and upload photos fast enough! I love to use it with my family, and my son Thomas. He gets a kick out of putting his voice or image alongside our photos. I see great potential for this to work in classrooms as well.

In my former life as a high school math teacher (for almost 11 years), I didn’t do a ton of things with pictures, however, I think even I would’ve used Voicethread. I used to send students out in the halls to get pictures, and sometimes even data to use in class, so I’m sure I would’ve used Voicethread. So, why would’nt I have been able to take a picture of something like the Golden Gate Bridge or the Gateway Arch, and let kids make comments on the math behind it.

Well, since I’ve been using this site, I used the browse feature for a few things, and found these mathcasts by the “Mathcast Team” and their teacher Tim Fahlberg (There are 25 pages worth!). I e-mailed him earlier this year because I was so impressed! What he does is to put a worksheet up on Voicethread, and let kids work out their answers! Could be done in groups or individually. What a great way to engage students, or to help review before a test!

I think much of this comes from a Canadian Math teacher who I happened to hear about from David Jakes at the NYSCATE conference in Rochester, NY back in November 2007. The teachers’ name is Darren Kuropatwa, and he has really challenged the way I think (and I’m sure many others people’s views) on teaching high school math. First of all, he has a blog for each of his classes and then he has students, yes students, get the notes for the day up there on the blog. They can then comment…..OH WAIT, they use photos and he finds ways to challenge them to bring photos into almost every lesson! With Math! Brilliant! It is amazing, you need to see some to know what I mean. This is a list of his blogs he’s done with his class. The blog he uses for his main website is here, and then I’ll provide a link to his Slideshare account with some of the projects the students have produced. I think it’s amazing.

To get back to my point about Voicethread, though, because of Darren, I started thinking more and more about using photos in all classes (not just Math), and I think Voicethread gives us another avenue that is easy for teachers and students. I used Voicethread to create a Voicethread on how to sign up and register for a K-12 account with Voicethread…..I know, now I’m getting confused. I embedded the Voicethread below:

Also, I’ll post this more, but I need help! I created a group in Ning.com for educators to share resources, just come in to talk and post, or possibly to get started using Voicethread at: http://voicethread.ning.com

It’s free and painless and I would GREATLY appreciate as many voices as I can get, both expert and beginner. Hey, they don’t all have to be positive either, if there are problems or things you don’t like post them as well, just don’t be rude!

Thanks again, hope to see or hear from you soon about Voicethread, or any other great Web 2.0 tool.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 2nd, 2008 at 8:31 am and is filed under Uncategorized and Tagged audio, camcorder, Canada, collaboration, comment, David Jakes, djakes, Golden Gate Bridge, learning, Mark Carls, math, Mathcast, Mathcast Team, mcarls, New York, NY, NYSCATE, pen, record, Rochester, sharing, SlideShare, slidshare.net, students, teaching, Tim Fahlberg, voice, voice over, voicethread You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.