VoiceThread Spanish Skills Portfolio

I went and rearranged e-portfolios again.

As if I didn’t have enough portfolio templates already.

My colleague talked me out of the interactive infograph portfolio. She’s pretty much our tech whiz, so if Sra. Payseur says it’s too many steps to upload an image to ThingLink, create four VoiceThreads, upload evidence to the VoiceThreads, link and then move the VoiceThreads all  BEFORE you add the badges that actually indicate the standards that are being demonstrated…I’m inclined to believe her.

And, you know, when I look at it that way, I guess I agree.

Template Structure

So I opted to make yet another Google Sites template (which, if you look closely, you can copy yourself straight from that link!). This time, though, I opted to break pages down into 4 skills–reading, listening, speaking, and writing–instead of 5. After all, isn’t most speaking at the novice level interpersonal anyway? And really, what run-of-the-mill employer actually cares about the difference between negotiated and presentational speech? Can you talk and be understood? is all anyone outside of linguistical circles really wants to know, right?

Since I switched back from Livebinders to Google Sites, I also managed to squeeze four sublevels of modified Can-Dos onto each pageÑ Novice Mid through Intermediate Low PLUS overviews for the levels Novice through Advanced. All with plenty of room for a nice big scrolling evidence window in the middle of each page!

How’d I do it?

VoiceThread.

With VoiceThread, the future employer and/or gatekeeper of all things college and prerequisite can see the students’ performances at a glance, no scrolling or endless link clicking. The first thing they’ll see is the title slide (step 2 in the handy dandy set up instructions–free on TeachersPayTeachers!), and then they’ll just see progressively more impressive samples of your students’ skills scroll by (though they may have to poke some arrow buttons to progress through the impressiveness).

Also this time, I emphasized self-evaluation by directing students to review their samples before they highlighted the objectives they demonstrated with those samples. So far it has at least made a few of them re-record at least one sample, so I’ll take that as a sign of progress.

VoiceThread Tips

So I was all excited about how students could upload pictures OR videos OR documents to display on their VoiceThreads–and then comment in writing or audio or video additions!

Too bad it turns out that even 30 second videos were too big to upload with “Add Media” on the free accounts.

HOWEVER the videos students had recorded worked PERFECTLY if they uploaded them as COMMENTS (well, perfectly and upside-down for some reason…) So I made this instructional video to help the kiddos do just that (unfortunately Screencastify was on the fritz, so I had to record a track after the fact to a Snagit screencast using WeVideo–it’s tech-ception!–which did not capture the full glory of my lip syncing.)

Students also experimented with different formats when we discovered the video upload trick. A couple of kiddos tried just putting their videos on their title slide, which is nice for immediacy, as the videos just follow one right after the other. However for me as an evaluator, I like a little time to digest between videos. Plus the whole autoplay effect could be a bit for the untrained ear (though it is handy while making notes on a rubric in another window)…overwhelming, and the title slide provides a nice pause before diving in.

On the subject of title slides, I required their name, the course name, and the skill on the image, and beyond that only asked that it be neat. I especially liked the ones that used Skitch to add the required labels to pictures of themselves. The Chromebook filtered camera shots of them with whiteboards were pretty cute too, but plain old Paint or a snapshot of notebook paper worked too.

HINT: VoiceThread now lets you create cover art, but this is NOT a title slide and really only shows up in your VoiceThread dashboard.