Digital Storytelling is a great way to get students actively engaged in material. Students in this day and age need to be challenged with technology, and incorporating it into their learning is a great way to reach them on their level. It gets them using their creative minds while learning content, and most students would be more engaged by this than lecturing or learning from the blackboard.
VoiceThread is a great tool and I can definately see how I would use it. As I mentioned before, I do not want to be a teacher, but instead a behavior therapist for children with autism. Nearly all the kids I work with now have significant speech delays. Some are nonverbal, and some are verbal, but sometimes their speech is broken and forced. One of my higher-functioning kids is verbal, but his speech sounds very forced and unnatural, and I don't think he is aware of how it sounds. For him I could create a VoiceThread for him where I ask him questions pertaining to his ABLLS (Assessment of Basic Language and Learning Skills) goals and he has to answer them through leaving an audio comment that he has to playback to himself. That way he is addressing his goals and targets, as well as learning how to make his voice sound more natural.
SlideShare is a very similar to VoiceThread, except without the option of adding audio. I chose to create a SlideShare and I made it into a sample probe of the goals and targets of a student. Like I mentioned in a previous post, generalization is the hardest thing for children with autism. Taking the goals and targets that are normally taught and probed at the table or desk, and putting them into a digital format for a student to read and answer would be a great way to help them generalize that task. Instead of being a "drill" it turns into almost a game or quest that child goes on the answer the questions before he moves on to the next slide.
SlideCast is closely related to SlideShare, except now you have the option to add audio and video to a slide. This tool seems amazing to use, and I would have chose to create a SlideCast, except I was sort of overwhelmed at first with all the different tools on SlideCast. But, I can definately see myself creating SlideCasts for my students with autism once I get a good chance to practice and play with all the different settings.
Presentation
16 years ago
Kellyn,
ReplyDeleteThe comments I will leave for you are a little different than something I would write another teacher because unlike them, you will not be in a classroom. I think you have a great opportunity to use tools such as SlideShares and SlideCasts with your students because you will have a more intimate setting where just you and the child are sitting in front of the computer screen and working together. As you stated in this post, you can use the VoiceThreads to allow your students to hear how they speak. I think that this would be extremely helpful for your students who have stutters and other speech problems because they may be hearing their mistakes for the first time.
I do not quite remember all of your unit questions, but adding these into your digital storytelling tools would be a great way to teach important lessons to your students through technology. You seemed to meet all of your ABLLS goals in your SlideShare presentation, which is great. You had a lot of different subjects to work on which is something I chose to do as well. I think it is important for all students to learn that certain skills are not just used in one subject area. If one of your students masters sequencing, they can use this skill in more than just their work with you and can transfer it to their everyday life. Overall, you did a great job with your SlideShare. I would love to hear about how you begin to use VoiceThreads with your students and how much they progress after using this tool.