Today I took our reading of The Hillsborough Ballad one step further using much loved but under utilised tool, Voicethread. One of the first points I will to make here is that Voicethread has always supported FREE education accounts, continues to do so and certainly deserves recognition for that.
I first use Voicethread at Taunton’s College, to enable students to outline and comment upon the success of football campaigns tackling issues such as racism and fair play in football, part of an Ethics and Values unit. Voicethread has come a long way since 2007 with more collaborative and moderating features, variety of media and sharing features. Yet it remains so simple even my 7a3 class mastered creating an account and contributing a variety of voice and text comments.
The Hillsborough Ballad with Voicethread
A three / four lesson scheme of work prepared in 40 minutes. Here are a few ideas.
Find some strong photo imagery (from Flickr) associated with the Hillsborough disaster, remembrance events and ‘Justice for the 96’ events, images from the disaster, newspaper front pages. Upload some of the images in one simple click, label and order them. Set the moderation rules. Setting aside a few extra images for lessons 2/3.
Use PowerPoint I set one of the images as the background, overlay the words from the ballad and save as JPEG, add it to the Voicethread and you have your stimulus (10 mins max). Finally add Voicethread instructions where appropriate and a text comment instruction, just in case a students needs text reassurance. In all honesty, much easier than writing a worksheet IMHO.
Lesson 0
Introduce the poem and the history behind it. A traditional start before moving onto Voicethread. Original voices. High impact but carefully selected images. Show a one or two minute clip. What emotions are they experiencing. I will let you decide what you wish to lead with. Homework comes with a sensitivity warning. As a result you must speak with parents, carers, grandparents. Q Where were they when Hillsborough happened. (Kennedy / Diana moment)
Lesson 1
Get students to create accounts, review the Voicethread. Read the ballad. Have some key prompts for those common questions. Or as it is an “online” lesson a collection of resources / Newsround articles to help answer students questions. Demo how to leave comments. For Year 7s, that filled the hour.
Lesson 2
Students were encouraged to re-read the ballad and select 4 lines which they felt were ’emotive.’ They were to practice reading these lines, before recording them and then explaining why they though they were important.
The netbooks we were using already had inbuilt mics, although we did try to work with headsets, too much effort for the gain in audio quality. It was a little noisy at times, but very focused. Some students did voice comments others I detected highlighting areas of the slide and posting written comments. All in all, a productive , enjoyable and sensitive lesson.
Lesson 3
Add the final images, ask more challenging questions. Get the students to dig deeper around the ballad or issue you wish them to explore. Ask the more able students tackled the more challenging questions whilst you support those students who have not yet left a comment, typically reading or confidence issues. To finish, I embedded the finished resource in a webpage, in our course, on our VLE, using the Moodle plugin. Following the lesson, additional comments were added to the Voicethread – this was not proscribed homework, just enthused learners.
What is more, with a neat Moodle plugin / filter, all I need to add is a [vt:codenumber] and the voicethread is embedded in our course, just as it is at the bottom of this post.
The syntax is:
[[vt:nnnnnn]] or [[vtsmall:nnnnnn]]
For example, to embed thread 409, you would just do:
[[vt:409]]
To embed thread 409 in a smaller size, you would just do:
[[vtsmall:409]]