An Experience with Multimedia

A few important concepts stood out to me, but first of all the 5-year-old podcast was adorable. I have several teachers who would –WITHOUT A DOUBT– run with this project! ... I would LOVE to have a gift like this from my daughter.

1) Need to give students different tasks to get them to share different content through different mediums
--This reminds me of a quick project I threw together last fall that was unsuccessful. I gave students a topic and told them they could choose their mode of presentation. I purposely gave them the freedom to do what they wanted, but unfortunately, they didn't have a toolbox to work from. I need to add "tasks" to prepare them for this type of thinking, planning, and creating.

2) Privacy is a concern when publishing, but it isn't what we think it is. Fryer helped me to see this in a different way. Statistically speaking, predators don't see a student's picture online then kidnap him/her. Generally, predators know the victim... or have been corresponding (which is more of the area we need to watch out for). But this is an area that we need to think through a little more and understand a little better.

3) After watching a Voicethread, we heard from Sara. She said the toughest part about creating her Voicethread was not uploading the pictures but was the content (what am I going to say). This is important because this starts with writing... so even though this product reveals little writing, students will have written their script and rehearsed their script (and rewritten and edited)... and so on.

4) In this same Voicethread project, we see that another critical component is the response from peers. This means that students are preparing their product for a larger audience than just the teacher - requiring a different line of thinking. We can even invite parents to the link which takes on a whole new perspective.