What have we sewn?

photo courtesy of trekkyandy

Were you with me on that one? We've been studying homophones, and I'm suffering from acute appundicitis...so I had to, ahem, follow the thread (as it were).

Glad that's over?
Me too.

I think that, beneath the sarcasm and penchant for blaspheming against good Mr. Beach, I'm a pretty shy and private person. For this reason, I felt that the personal Voicethread laid me bare. Did this stop me from reading sad homemade poems and slapping up pictures of my daughter? Nooo, but I was pretty uncomfortable throughout the process. (Lucky for me, I've only got two followers...)

As I weeded through our infinite cyberstacks of photos, a few things occurred to me: 1) What good are all these unprinted images if I only look at them on random Tuesday nights?, 2) It's probably incredibly beneficial to go into a project like this with either an exact image or text idea, if not both (sooooo many slideshows...), and 3) That Candance is wicked slick. Now that I have a firm grasp of all of my available images, I am in a constant state of mentally storyboarding my final project.

Both of my Voicethreads were solidly text driven. Perhaps this was a byproduct of the dizzying array of images I have available. It was simply easier for me to concentrate on the writing. As a teacher using Voicethread in the classroom, I will likely have students' first experiences involve choosing or creating images to accompany their writing. As a class, we are chipping away at our own Where I'm From poems (from which I envision a tapestry of culminating threads). With these poems, in particular, I think the visual nature of the software will reinforce students' understanding of the dynamic nature of writing.