After spending about an hour stringing together my students videos, adding captions and effects I learned about voicethread. We experimented with this website in class- it basically gives the same effect as the digital story I made, but in a LOT less time.
On our second to last day of school, writing time was about our favorite pre-kindergarten memory. (Hint--ask children this question BEFORE you finish your curriculum and spend a week of going on long neighborhood walks and picnic lunches...almost every child wrote about our week of fun.) We did our writing, I took a picture and had the children come over to me and read their sentence.
The most exciting part...you can do this all on your phone with the free voicethread app!I took a picture of each page (take pictures in the order you want them to appear, you can't drag pictures around like you can on the computer version), then had the kids come up one at a time to read their sentence. The app counts down for you "4, 3, 2,1" then your picture appears and you speak. The picture will appear on the screen for as long as you speak.
HINT: you can't crop the sound effects on voicethread like you can with windows live movie maker, so make sure to re-record if there is a huge pause that you don't want to appear in your story.You can preview the comment and choose if you would like to save or re-record, so this is easy.
There are less effect choices than movie maker, but I found voicethread much more user friendly and for a busy classroom teacher- it's the perfect tool to make a quick digital class story.
I attempted to add captions to the voicethread just like I did in movie maker, but the text shows up as a comment on the side after the speaking rather than under the picture as the child reads like I wanted. I still have more playing around to do, but for now- here is my first attempt at a voicethread digital class book:
One of the videos in our session notes showed how a teacher got the writing below the picture by inserting the picture into a blank PowerPoint slide and adding a text box below it to write in the sentence. Then a screen shot of the slide is taken, and that screenshot is uploaded into VoiceThread. I did something similar when I uploaded the children's book covers. I put each image into a Google Slide, added a text box below it, and used a screen capture of the slide and then uploaded the slide. I did this for each of the books. It worked fine. Something to consider for the future. However, for what you have here, I prefer the way you did it with the voice recording and text appearing together. It works perfectly.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, I think your video came out awesome! What an adorable way for the students to commemorate the year. I bet they loved watching it too. I also found one of the difficulties with VoiceThread was that you couldn't add text to come up on the picture like a caption. I love how you first put it onto PowerPoint slides, and then did a screen shot. Seeing the text that the students meant to write helps the viewers clearly see their attempts at writing their sentence (VERY impressive for Pre-K by the way!), and is also reinforcing for the students to see their work as it should be written. Thank you for sharing this tip, I hope you continue using VoiceThread with your students.
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