Over the last few weeks we have been working with the poem The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes. We have been discussing and exploring it through lots of talk and drama. On Monday we talked as a class about the drama technique of hot-seating, I asked the children to work with a partner to prepare some questions they might ask the Highwayman if they had the chance. As they were working I wandered out of the class and immediately returned into the room, but this time I tiptoed in and asked one of the children, in a whispery voice, whether it was safe or not. They looked bemused and I crept through the rest of the class shiftily looking from side to side. I had become the Highwayman.
I have always enjoyed drama as a way into text and the children love it when their teacher goes out on a limb a little and pretends. I told the children that I didn’t have much time and that I had gotten their message about meeting them here. We had a series of questions about the plot, the character’s feelings about Bess and what it was like to be a criminal. All the time I was checking through the blinds and looking suspiciously at the kids. When my time was up I acted as if the paranoia had got to me and I accused the children of setting me up – that it was a trap and I with one more furtive glance I dashed off out the door again. When I returned we were all smiling. (The children went on to do hot-seating in smaller groups.)
In the following lesson we used a Voicethread to further explore the characters in the poem. (Each child had their own laptop in this session.) I asked the children to add voice and text (I always give them the choice) comments on the various character images I had uploaded. I prompted them to make these kinds of comments:
- Questions that they might like to ask the characters. Consolidating the previous drama work.
- Answer a question that they see from someone else. Take on the character’s role and answer a question posed by other people in the class.
- General reactions and thoughts on the different characters in the poem.
I have enjoyed using Voicethread in the classroom for
a long time now and have always considered it to be a great tool to encourage quality speaking and listening. This was only the second session using the tool and I once again witnessed children recording, listening back and improving what they had done. The open and transparent nature of sharing their work seems to sharpen their attention to detail especially in voice recordings. I sat with a few boys who need considerable support with their literacy and they were just having a great time, big grins, listening and enjoying the comments from others in the class and recording their own.
Finding their voice. When you work like this as a class there is a tangible sense of a community of use.
We were coming to the end of the session and with 10 minutes to go I wanted to review the lesson with the children but I decided to change the plan a little and explore a new method to do this. I asked them to log into their newly created Google Mail accounts and send me a short message explaining what they thought of that lesson. With my inbox displayed on the SMARTBoard the reviews of the lesson rolled in. Although the comments were simple in nature it proved a point, it tested the process more than anything. These 9 year olds were independently able to switch applications, sign into their accounts, think about their learning and respond by composing and sending an email in under 10 minutes and for some much less than that. The children each had an opportunity to express their feelings about the lesson, to add their voice to the lesson review. If I had just asked them as a whole class then I would have only been able to garner a handful of comments. Would these comments have been from the same groups of children? Probably – so the use email in this instance helped everyone to express their own indiviual remarks.
I am not sure that email is the ideal tool to respond with lesson comments, although replying to an email that you have sent to the children with key questions about the lesson would be more appropriate I think.
Using Google Chat is another tool that would allow for instant messaging in review of a lesson, or I could have added a final image on the Voicethread for the children to add lesson review comments. (Another alternative is to take advantage of a
Google Form for lesson review)
Whichever way you approach it I think that it gives every child the opportunity to make their voice heard.
WHAT ELSE
What a brilliant lesson! (I wandered over from Twitter…)
@Anthony – many thanks for the kind words, don’t worry cheese is good! You have always been a great supporter to what I write and I really appreciate it.
We are using a standard free account flagged as educational but not the ed.voicethread.com accounts. I have registered one username password with a year group gmail account made in Google Ed Apps – you then create identities for that account (within account settings), so we have 30 id’s for the kids to use.
Children login with one username and password, same for whole class – making management very easy, then switch identities when commenting to ensure their work is shown to be authored by them. They will upload avatar images to the identities soon. Works for us!
Hope that helps.
Thom thansk again for a great post – in the absence of any national guidance on ICT yours is the place I come to first for inspiration and examples of ‘what works tech.
Sorry for the cheese!
A question – when using voicethread – are yoru kids using / regsitered with their gmail account/email or something else?
@ Pete – thanks for the comment, great to hear from you – let me know how you get on with the GDocs and Vthread work. Send on over your themes and I am sure we will find something we can do.
Hi Tom,
Really enjoying looking through your blog. Google docs and voicethread is something I’m going to be looking at using more as it sounds awesome. Let me know if you fancy doing some collaborative work this year. I can email you my themes for each term and see if there are any you want to get involved in.
Speak to you soon mate
Pete
What a great idea! I can’t wait to try with my 9 year olds. Thanks for sharing this!