“What did you do in school today?”
This is a common question that parents ask their children when they come home from school but young children have a hard time answering. In preschool I like to use technology to help show parents what their students are doing in school and to help the students reflect on what they have learned. Sometimes it is also difficult to show a young child’s learning because so much of their learning is through play
VoiceThreads allow you to upload pictures or video and make written, audio, or video recordings. I use VoiceThreads to give students the chance to show their learning.
Use in Early Childhood
In the beginning of the year I took pictures of the things we do throughout the day. Then had different students explain the different things that happen in our classroom. This gave students the chance to recount what they did at school to their parents.
VoiceThreads also give students the chance to reflect on a project. After our class project of making pizza I created a VoiceThread with two pictures and asked the students two questions, “How did we make the pizza” and “What was your favorite part of making the pizza”
VoiceThreads can also be used to tell a story or recreate a story. In the following example the Kindergarten got ready for school by making their own version of Mrs. Bindergarten Gets Ready for Kindergarten.
A VoiceThread can also be used as a sort of diary of events in your classroom. You could allow the students to take the pictures and create the “caption” or you could take the pictures and have them narrate.
VoiceThreads can be used for special events. For our Grandparent’s Day celebration, we allowed the grandparents to leave messages for their grandchildren to view later.
Amanda Helmkamp is in her fifth year as preschool teacher and third year as technology coordinator at Zion Lutheran School, St. Charles, MO. You can follow Amanda on Twitter or her blog ahelmkamp.blogspot.com Special thanks to @rlimback for the use of some of her class VoiceThreads
