Voice Thread

It amazes me ever week that there are all of these tech tools available that I have never even heard of. I was throughly impressed with voice threads and the many features that it had available for free. The name completely threw me off as I thought it was just something similar to Audacity of being able to take audio notes. When Jesse and others presented it last week I realized that we had a goldmine of endless possibilities.

Voice thread I feel is the combination  of the tech tools that we have already looked at. It has a very similar set up and features to socrative and padlet while at the same time having the functions of audacity. I really like the ability to use both audio and video either when presenting new information or when commenting on certain slides. A really interesting function that we tried (with Jesse) was the ability to leave a voicemail in the slide. Voice thread would literally call your phone allowing you to leave whatever message you wanted. While I don't know how much use that would actually have I still thought it was creative nonetheless.

The great thing about voice thread is that I feel it can have multiple types of usage within the classroom. One can simply type up a lesson plan for the day to present to students or embed a video with comments on a slide. If you wanted to get a little more creative you can use the tool for when students are absent by having all of the information but also adding audio and video components so that students understand what is exactly expected of the assignment. Another great aspect is the ability to put the usage of the tool into the hand of your students. I could totally see using audio or video representations when doing short assignment questions since students normally have a better time saying information instead of writing it or using it to give constructive feedback.

On a final note I really enjoyed Jesse Samantha, Jimmy, Betsy and Carl's presentation style. I felt that they had a really good grasp on the class throughout the entirety of time allotted for the presentation. This is something I felt I lacked when presenting audacity and sometimes when I student teach. I have to make sure that I am engaging for the entire time instead of just the beginning. A great presentation all around with the style and the tool that they taught us.

Hope for the Future

Tom Ward instilled a confidence in me I felt I lost 5 months into the program. This confidence was the ability to be creative. Like many other Macers, this one year program has really thrown me off my game with the amount of work I am suppose to do and the amount of information I am suppose to process in such a short period of time. I haven't been able to do what I normally like, which is reading outside of whats assigned in class and being able to just explore different avenues in general. This I feel has become even more important with the fact that I am student teaching and I would love to explore different ideas to use in the classroom. Tom said something however, at the beginning of class that help ease some of that tension in that he was in the same scenario when he was doing this program. When the program was over because he had learned what he had, he felt the need to always strengthen his craft and use different platforms as needed in order to do so. By saying this, Tom assured me that hopefully at the end of this program, I too can use the tools I have learned in it to push my way of thinking and making sure to turn over every rock to do so. Something else Tom showed me was how truly all social media sites in one form of another can help students when trying to explain a concept. While many of the different tech tools that have been presented in class I can see myself using, I really didn't see how both Facebook and Twitter could help in the classroom. Furthermore, because I have a heavy background in social psychology research from undergrad and focused a lot on empathy and narcissism, I was under the impression that these two specific sites with others, were doing a lot more harm than good. Funny enough, Tom showed through the social psychology realm that if one is truly seeing information through the lenses of their students and the background that they are coming from, that you can find tools in the least likely of places. Tom also showed how that not only one subject could dominate the realms of these social networking platforms. If one was to try using these websites in the classroom I figured that one would only do so in the field of humanities, not really giving much thought to stem, outside of just doing a video with whatever material was being covered. Mr. Ward showed, however, with the video of the basketball using geometry, just how wrong I was and even simplified a concept I had been struggling with for my MTTC Professional Readiness exam. He showed how a teacher can incorporate there own strengths (Tom being a coach) with students interest, in order to engage students in higher order thinking. All in all I really enjoyed Tom’s presentation and the aura of confidence that he showed throughout the entirety of the night (even when his presentation wasn’t working correctly in the beginning). I think he is an excellent example of how good a teacher can be with an extremely incredible work ethic and the open mindedness to explore new ideas, all with trying to help better teach different concepts to his students.