Students listening to a poetry reading of “Owl Moon” on the iPad using VoiceThread. Other applications of VoiceThread: poems read and thought of rather than written, digital versions of narratives, interviews etc., quick and easy way to do a podcast.
When January roles around, many of us find ourselves with bright new faces in our classroom, wide-eyed and a bit nervous. New students starting mid year, are to me, both the most wonderful occurrence and the most difficult.
Catching up a student on the ins and outs of your classroom, technologies he or she might not know, as well as assessing their learning levels so that they can be placed in the appropriate reading and word study groups are all necessary, but time consuming.
My new student is full of the most inquisitive questions and desire to understand. That being said, this wonderful student is still behind many of the other kids in my class. Therefore, I’ve needed to sit with her as we work through math, reading and writing in order to allow her the necessary explanations that will enable her to participate.
That being said, my other students are limited in the time I can give them. So, today I tested out using my ipad as a second “teacher”. I thought of this idea while she and I were reading, then proceeded to spend 15 minutes figuring out how to find an age appropriate website or PDF that I could then convert to an ebook through a site I had googled moments before.
By the length of that sentence, my brain and fingers were trying to move at about 100 miles per hour. So, finally we reached our destination. I changed the general settings on my iPad to allow for accessibility (ie. so that the iPad will read to you when you highlight something). Then, I showed her how to highlight sections so the iPad would read it to her as she read along. We then worked on going back and highlighting the words she still didn’t understand.
This was helpful as I was then able to walk to other reading groups and listen in on their discussion or chime in with additional questions.
My next phase of implementation is to 1) be ready with the PDF prior to handing over the iPad 2) look into installing an epub plug-in on my browser (testing out Chrome plug-in here) 3) figure out how to enable highlighting words and researching their definitions 4) asking myself how can I take this to another level with her? (As of now I am thinking of having her voice record a summary using voicethread.)
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