Woices

I finally got to work with the new English teacher.

At my school we (the technology specialists) are to meet with our teachers every 6th day for about 15 minutes to touch base. Last year was my first year at this school and I failed to make these meetings a routine, but found every day to be very busy. This year I am staying more on track. Now I can't even manage my time and projects because of so many of these tech meetings last for about an hour and with all the great ideas out there I get swamped with "ah-ha's" that I want to do. Now I don't have a class of my own so to use these great web things I have to sucker a teacher in to believing that it is fun and easy. It is so weird, but I get all jazzed up and LOVE interacting with the students. Then I become completely ADHD and creating the end result is so difficult! :-) If only the web and all of its developments would slow down.

So back to the English teacher: She had her students rewrite an Urban Legend for a Halloween-y activity. Spooky story telling always catches a boy's attention. (note: I work at an all boy's school.) I had just heard of Woices and MapSkip from Tom Barrett, who is a genius at his job. This story project could work by giving a location of the legend. I have only tried it out with one boy, and am not 100% finished, but someone commented and I ran to the writer and teacher to share the news.

The Project:
I chose Woices vs Mapskip, because these were pieces of fiction. I felt that MapSkip was wanting more real information on their site. The student and I surfed over to Woices and looked around the map to find where our story took place. Then we read the story, identified the parts that the setting would changed, found where on the map we wanted it to occur, then jotted the area down on a paper. We used a highlighter to separate the story in these new settings portions. Then the student used Garageband to create audio recordings of his story. One recording per setting. He shared them as an MP3. Back to Woices! We went back, found our locations, uploaded the MP3, gave the echo (that is what woices calls 1 recording). We gave all the echos associated with the story the same title but with a number so that we knew the order. Since this was the first set of echos I have ever done, it was easy to group these together to form what they call a walk.

It was SOOO easy! The woices part of the task took about 20 minutes - recording, uploading, and posting each echo. After the excitment of the project set in I ran back to the teacher and grabbed 6 boys to draw me an illustration. Since these echos can have a picture this will dress up the "walk" some. Now I have to acquire the illustrations, scan, and upload them. I hope I can focus to finish this part.

And the coolest part! Ninja user commented that he or she liked the walk! I shared it with the boy - he and I were beaming. And his 62 peers - are envious! yessss ~ hooked 'em!

Next idea: MapSkip with descriptive writing topic: Beach or Mountains?