Pre-Kindergarten Memories: A Digital Story

What better way to reflect upon the year then to create a digital story about it?
That's just what we did. Most of my students entered my classroom not knowing their letters, sounds; how to read or write; and some had never held a pencil...I'm so proud of all that they've accomplished this year. Thanks to my Integrating Technology and Literacy grad class, I'm able to share their progress with you in the form of a digital version of our last class book of the 2013-2014 school year.

Pre-Kindergarten's end of the year bulletin board

In class last week I learned a tip about creating captions in a voicethread story. I took a screenshot of the child's work, put it in powerpoint and typed in my caption. All I had to do was screenshot the powerpoint slide, and save it as a picture. In vociethread i was able to select the original picture, select "replace" and change the old picture for the one with the caption. As long as I selected "change/replace" the children's reading remained with the slide. There are still some little tweaks I would have made (like making sure the dotted line text box or mouse arrow was not on the page when I took a screenshot) but lesson learned, and my next one will be even better.

The end of the year in pre-k is a really exciting time because the kids have a good sight word vocabulary and are using these words in their writing. My students are really excited about reading and writing time and everybody loves a read-aloud, from this class assignment I have learned that technology can help combine the two into a digital story.

Knowing their page will be in a class book gives the kids a little extra motivation to do their best drawing and writing. The challenging part of writing time with younger students is getting them to read back their writing. Reading their words on audio recording allows my students to hear themselves read. If they didn't like the way they sounded they were able to rerecord until they were satisfied. This was great practice for them. Now that the book is together it can be used just the same as any other class book, provided the technology is available. The story is bookmarked on the classroom computer and on my phone, for the students use. The kids LOVE hearing themselves and their friends reading the story. Another perk of technology, unlike a class boo that has to remain in- class, a digital class book can be emailed or even texted to families!

And now here it is...the final draft of my second digital story, "Prekindergarten Memories in Room 11" (with captions):