Natasha Pierce's List: Teaching Language

• After collecting a series of images that represent your topic, carefully script out short opening comments for each image that include a question for viewers to consider.  Scripting comments prior to recording will allow you to organize your thinking—and your images—in a logical order. 
• Initial comments should be somewhere between 1 and 3 sentences long.  Longer comments will discourage viewers from adding their own thoughts—and tend to bore viewers quickly! 
• Highly accomplished Voicethreaders are constantly thinking while interacting with a Voicethread presentation.  They come to the conversation with an open mind, willing to reconsider their own positions—and willing to challenge the notions of others. 

• To be an active Voicethreader, start by carefully working your way through a presentation.   While viewing pictures and listening to the comments that have been added by other users, you should:

   

   

   
   
  1. Gather Facts:  Jot down things that are interesting and new to you 
   
   
   
  2. Make Connections:  Relate and compare things you are viewing and hearing to things that you already know. 
   
   
   
  3. Ask Questions:  What about the comments and presentation is confusing to you?  What don’t you understand?  How will you find the answer?  Remember that there will ALWAYS be questions in an active thinker’s mind! 
   
   
   
  4. Give Opinions:  Make judgments about what you are viewing and hearing.  Do you agree?  Do you disagree?  Like?  Dislike?  Do you support or oppose anything that you have heard or seen?  Why?
• • This reminds me of…
   
  • This is similar to…
   
  • I wonder…
   
  • I realized…
   
  • I noticed…
   
  • You can relate this to…
   
  • I’d like to know…
   
  • I’m surprised that…
   
  • If I were ________, I would  ______________
   
  • If __________ then ___________
   
  • Although it seems…
   
  • I’m not sure that…

• While commenting, try to respond directly to other viewers.  Begin by quoting some part of the comment that you are responding to help other listeners know what it is that has caught your attention.  Then, explain your own thinking in a few short sentences.  Elaboration is important when you’re trying to make a point.  Finally, finish your comment with a question that other listeners can reply to.  Questions help to keep digital conversations going!

   

   

   

  When responding to another viewer, don’t be afraid to disagree with something that they have said.  Challenging the thinking of another viewer will help them to reconsider their own thinking—and will force you to be able to explain yours!  Just be sure to disagree agreeably—impolite people are rarely influential. 
• • Highlight a comment from our Voicethread conversation that closely matches your own thinking.   Why does this comment resonate---or make sense to---you?
   
  • Highlight a comment from our Voicethread conversation that you respectfully disagree with.  If you were to engage in a conversation with the commenter, what evidence/argument would you use to persuade them to change their point of view?
   
  • Highlight a comment from our Voicethread conversation that challenged your thinking in a good way and/or made you rethink one of your original ideas.  What about the new comment was challenging?  What are you going to do now that your original belief was challenged?  Will you change yoru mind?  Will you do more researching/thinking/talking with others?
   
  • Highlight the strand of conversation from our Voicethread conversation that was the most interesting or motivating to you. Which ideas would you like to have more time to talk about? Why? What new topics does this conversation make you want to study next?
   
   

   
• You can download my Voicethread comment rubric here:

• Once students have viewed both tutorials and filled out their viewing guides, they must submit a "Gimmie a Thread" permission slip detailing the content of the presenation that they are planning to create---as well as the sources for the images that they intend to use and the students that they would like to invite to their conversation:

   

   

   

  Handout_Vthread_Permission.doc

   

   

   

  All of this information is posted in my classroom blog for easy student access:

   

   

   

  http://guysread.typepad.com/theblurb/2008/09/voicethread-tra.html
• Voicethread Handouts

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   “When students see a list of problems, all of the same kind, they know the strategy to use before they even read the problem,” said Dr. Rohrer. “That’s like riding a bike with training wheels.” With mixed practice, he added, “each problem is different from the last one, which means kids must learn how to choose the appropriate procedure — just like they had to do on the test.”
• But hurriedly jam-packing a brain is akin to speed-packing a cheap suitcase, as most students quickly learn — it holds its new load for a while, then most everything falls out.
• When the neural suitcase is packed carefully and gradually, it holds its contents for far, far longer. An hour of study tonight, an hour on the weekend, another session a week from now: such so-called spacing improves later recall, without requiring students to put in more overall study effort or pay more attention, dozens of studies have found.

• No one knows for sure why. It may be that the brain, when it revisits material at a later time, has to relearn some of what it has absorbed before adding new stuff — and that that process is itself self-reinforcing.

   “The idea is that forgetting is the friend of learning,” said Dr. Kornell. “When you forget something, it allows you to relearn, and do so effectively, the next time you see it.”

   That’s one reason cognitive scientists see testing itself — or practice tests and quizzes — as a powerful tool of learning, rather than merely assessment. The process of retrieving an idea is not like pulling a book from a shelf; it seems to fundamentally alter the way the information is subsequently stored, making it far more accessible in the future.
• Of course, one reason the thought of testing tightens people’s stomachs is that tests are so often hard. Paradoxically, it is just this difficulty that makes them such effective study tools, research suggests. The harder it is to remember something, the harder it is to later forget.

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• So, what would be some innovative uses for wikis in the composition classroom?
   
   1. Any class project with a reference or encylopedic format. Instructions, manuals, glossaries, and the like are all excellent wiki applications.
   
   2. A class or group project with a bibliographic format. Students could gather websites related to a topic, then annotate, rank, and organize them.
   
   3. A letter or statement presented on behalf of the class. These documents occur often enough in the business world, where the "on behalf" basically means that everyone involved signed off on a draft. On a wiki, such a project would offer everyone a better chance to make a contribution.
   
   4. A handbook or textbook. Students could build a guide to correct punctuation and evaluated as a class. Thus, every student would have a stake in the project and likely benefit from the instruction it contained. Students are also familiar with "textbook" English and its avoidance of personal-sounding prose.
   
   5. Any other project that does not require specified authorship or protected documents. Wikis are authored by communities, not individuals.
  

• moving from pre-reading, through initial reading, and into rereading. This sequence carefully moves the learner from comprehension tasks to production tasks
• In addition, these tasks should build upon each other in terms of increasing cognitive difficulty.
• Pre-Reading:
• Pre-Reading: The initial levels of learning, as described in Bloom's Taxonomy, involve recognizing and comprehending features of a text. As proposed here, pre-reading tasks involve speaking, reading, and listening.
• tasks involve speaking, reading, and listening.
• Initial Reading
• Simple oral and written reproduction tasks should precede more complex production tasks that call for considering creative thinking about several issues at the same time.
• Rereading
• longer and more complex discourse
• critical thinking needs to interact with their general knowledge. Ideally, cultural context and the individual foreign language learner's own identity emerge as central to all acts of production.
• Multiple stages in reading engage the learners by returning to the language of the text from different points of view
• For example, a pre-reading for sub-topics of a subject, an initial reading to identify how topics are described, and a rereading to modify those descriptions by inserting them into a new genre or describing them for a different audience.

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