Voices of the world

This week I was introduced to Voices of the World and was asked to create a task for the month of March. I had heard about the network from my tutor, but was unsure what it was all about. I took the time to navigate my way around the website to familiarise myself with the concept. The website is only for educators and was created by Sharon Tonner.The aim being to connect children from all over the world using their voices instead of only the written word, such as letters and emails. The network was also designed to help children show an appreciation of different languages, accents and dialect, however, I feel it has achieved much more than just these aims. I feel the network brings us closer to achieving the goal of becoming global citizens. Children can have the opportunity to learn about the world they live in, where different countries are situated, different cultures, how other children of similar ages live and relate this to their own world.

A task is released at the beginning of each month with all contributions completed by the end of the month. Contributions are in the form of embedded code which are sent to a site 'administrator' who then places them on the VOTW wikispace. The VOTW wikispace for that month is not released until the last day of the month, so that all members can look and view all contributions from around the world. This allows the children to view everyone's work and hopefully appreciate the differences in culture.

There are two websites for Voices of the World. One is the children's and the other is the teachers'. The children's website has a brief outline of the task for that month, usually with an example. This is also where the children's work is displayed. (They can not only see their own work, but everyone else's from all over the world.) The teachers' website has a more detailed step by step guide to the task, so that regardless of their ICT abilities they should be able to manage and guide their class. They can also use this site as a means of communication if they need help, want to share their success or would like to make more links with other schools. 

Our group was given the chance to create the task for March. We decided it would be a good idea to use the song 'Happy Birthday to You' as our topic as it is sung all over the world. We felt this would be interesting for the children to share the different ways this can be sung and what it sounds like compared to our version. There was a vast number of different tools available online for us to use. It was almost overwhelming. We wanted to use something we had not used before, so that we could further our learning, but it was quite difficult to sift through and work out the different features. Time always seems to be a factor and it would be good to be able to sit and 'play' with different tools to increase awareness of what is available, but unfortunately it is always limited both in class and at home. I will just have to chip away at this sort of thing with any spare moments, although, now that I have the use of an Ipad surely this will make it easier :)  (more about the Ipad to follow, I promise). Our group decided to use Anamoto which is a free programme that combines your images, music and video clips into a small production a little bit like a movie trailer. We found it really easy to use with simple step by step instructions. We made an example using birthday images that were already available on the site. For the music, we found a YouTube video of 'Happy Birthday' and converted the soundtrack into mp3 using Fetchmp3. We then uploaded the mp3 file to Animoto which then combined everything to create our example.

  

Although I am pleased with the result I feel it maybe should have been modeled as we are asking the children to sing and use their own pictures (no children in pictures) and drawings, however if we had sung this may have put them off for life.

Once our creation was complete we made simple step by step instructions for the teachers. As we wanted the children's voices on their versions we told them to use Audacity to record their version and export to mp3 format.

I think that using VOTW is a brilliant way to communicate with different schools and learn about different countries in relation to your own. I was aprehensive at the start, as I thought it would be more hassle than it is worth. I can now see the benefits and would consider doing this when I have my own class.