Kindergarten VoiceThread

I love collaboration, and our half-day kindergarten teacher and our general music teacher and I put together a VoiceThread by the 23 students in the half-day kindergarten class. They learned the song "Down by the Bay" in music class, and then their classroom teacher had them write sentences that rhymed to complete a verse of the song, including an illustration of the sentence. She did a fabulous job of individualizing the task to each student's abilities, some just had to fill in rhyming words, while others wrote the whole sentence.

Once the papers were done, I scanned them and imported them into VoiceThread, then recorded each student saying their own sentence. I also recorded the class singing the whole song during their music class and included that singing at the beginning and end of the VoiceThread.

I am proud of our students and teachers, and hope to do even more collaborative projects like this next year.

Down by the Bay VoiceThread

Peer Coaching Delicious Links

Now that Delicious seems to be staying around, I am posting my collection of Peer Coaching links, which I will be adding to frequently over the next year.

http://www.delicious.com/joannafreeman/peer_coaching

Interactions with teachers

A short blog post about a technology teacher's interaction with a classroom teacher really struck a nerve with me. I struggle daily with how to approach specific teachers in my building. Some are open to new ideas, some are in denial that they will ever have to learn much beyond how to send an email, some want to try things that are way beyond their abilities, but I don't want them to experience deep disappointment and become discouraged. It is a constant balance of assessing their needs and wants and how they will react when I discuss technology with them.

The teacher in the article was honest with a classroom teacher, telling her essentially that if she really wants to be using technology, she needs to move beyond the projector, computer and PowerPoint. Now, we all know that she is using technology, but technology integration in education has moved far beyond that level of engagement. This connects with the last post on the Technology Integration Matrix. This teacher is using technology tools in a conventional and procedural way, without student choice or self-directed work, as far as we can tell from the blog post. She is ready to move on, based on the conversation, but it took knowledge of the classroom teacher and her comfort level to begin this conversation this abruptly.

I know most of my teachers well, but I only know two or three who would welcome this kind of open conversation. I need to think more about how I will approach my teachers about collaborating on technology integration, without raising their defenses.