Superior View: A Digital Writing Project

Lake Superior... A cherished place in my heart that is the subject of my Voicethread digital writing project. I first wrote this piece during the 2009 Minnesota Writing Project Summer Institute and I polished it with the help of my fabulous writing group, the Superior Scribes. I hope you'll feel like you are there too.

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I played with Voicethread a couple of years ago but I was only lurking, searching for great examples to send to teachers and incorporating Voicethread in my Tech Camp class on Web 2.0 applications for the immersion classroom. Now it was time to jump in!

I had thought about doing a Voicethread with this piece ever since the MWP Summer Institute. I wrote the first draft right after the MWP Summer Institute retreat (before the 3-week class). As I was writing on the deck, I remembered how we had discussed the power of pictures to not only evoke emotions and trigger writing but also to document and illustrate our writing. So I ran back into the cabin, grabbed my camera, and started documenting all the things I was writing about. Except for the picture of the water, I was somewhat disappointed by the washed out colors on my pictures. The day was truly magnificent. It deserved to be preserved in both words and pictures.

When it came to putting the Voicethread together, the software itself was easy to use and once I was home I was able to upload all my pictures at once within 20 seconds. The school’s network is definitely encountering some filtering issues: we are “under attack” as a recent network email stated… The most intimidating part of the process was the recording: I don’t have an external microphone and it wasn’t until the day after I was all done that I actually saw where the microphone is on my laptop (serves me well for doing this in dimly lit conditions late at night…). You should have seen me balancing the half-folded laptop on my lap, trying various sentences to figure out if it sounded best when I spoke close to the mousepad, or close to the keyboard… when in fact the blasted mikes are on each side of the web cam! Duh… I also found myself becoming very nitpicky about the exact intonation of my voice. Should I let it go way low at the end of this sentence or should I bring it up just a tad? Every little inflection became SO important!

Now that I’ve done it once, I would absolutely do another Voicethread. It’s such an easy tool to use. I have a myriad of classroom applications dancing in my head: teachers doing demos or mini-lessons for kids; kids reading pages of a class book; kids explaining their digital portfolio; kids explaining their metacognition in solving math or science problems; teachers posting a visual and kids calling in their interpretation/answer as comments, etc, etc… The possibilities are amazing!