Karen Janowski and Beth Lloyd's High Incident AT workshop at CEC (live blog part on second part of workshop).
Voicethread is digital, story telling media. It is a UDL tool. Digital media is a mistake tolerant media, like clay instead of mistake intolerant like paper. It is a wonderful, free tool where you create content in three steps.
Use your school e-mail account and choose "Go pro" and you get a free pro account for K-12. Which means unlimited Voicethread creation. Once in your account you can browser or go to my voice and see your content and content shared with you. In Voicethread parents, community members and peers can leave voice or text comments. We watched several examples at the workshop, including a Voicethread intervention to assess reading in a selectively mute little girl. Very cool. Another example was a mathcast which used the Voicethread doodler tool as a blackboard with the teacher explaining the lesson. Another example was creation and use of social stories for kids on the spectrum.
A question was asked about privacy. Voicethread has three options public, shared with people you select and private. Another question was about putting things in as opposed to just photographs. You can upload documents (word and PDF), powerpoint slides (if you upload a powerpoint presentation every PPT slide will be a Voicethread slide), and digital and scanned images. Another question was if multiple people can comment on a Voicethread at a time and the answer is yes. Comments can ber moderated or not. You also choose whether or not to list it on the browse. Ideas for use are book reports, country reports, reading assessment and more.
Blogger note: In severe classrooms perhaps as portfolios, social stories, instructions for paras on certain kids re: lifting, feeding, instruction. What else?
Kate,
ReplyDeleteWonderful to finally meet you! Thanks for stopping in our session.
How about using a VT to keep parents informed about activities their kids completed in your classroom?
Instead of a newsletter, create a VT of weekly events.
(And considering how deplorable the conditions your students face, use a VT to document the conditions).
You probably already thought of these ideas but you asked for suggestions. :-)
Hi Kate,
ReplyDeleteI love your site. I too am a teacher of this low incidence population so your site is a fabulous resource. I happened upon it while googling low incidence population. I also happen to be a student in the AT Special Education Program through Simmons/TEC and for my current class I just got done making a voice thread which I embedded into my classroom wiki site. I did a virtual tour of my classroom and thought I could use it for parents of new students to share a little about my classroom and how it is set up and how it works. I think I will also make photo journals for the students and their families at the end of the year using voice thread. It is such an exciting tool with unlimited potential. I will also use it for our field trip for the parents.