 They've worked with Voice Thread before, so I knew it was something that they would feel comfortable with but would also make it a little bit exciting to bring their thinking together. The first couple of Voice Threads we did were very basic things about strategies games that they had learned to play or what they were doing at recess. You know, I would take pictures of things and just put them in there so that they could practice the process of recording them or typing comments. I try not to throw both the technology and the content at them together for the first time. I love Voice Thread in the classroom and I was really excited to find it when I went from fifth grade down to first because my fifth graders were blogging. We had wikis tracking our learning throughout the year. There were so many things they were doing that I thought, we can't do this in first grade because they can't read and write yet. I mean they can read and write some but not to a level that was really going to capture their thinking. And so Voice Thread offered us that opportunity. It was a place for them to have a blog, to communicate with each other, to build their comments into conversations. It gave us a place to record our learning. So it opened up the things that I wanted them to be able to do even though many of them are pre-literate. I hope that them sitting down at Voice Thread and scrolling through the different images to choose what they wanted to comment on gave them a chance to synthesize about the two men, or at the very least about the one that they really were focused on as they tried to pick which image they wanted. I thought it was interesting to see that some of them knew immediately which image they wanted so they clearly had already kind of had a picture in their head of this person and what they were fascinated by. This is a portrait of George Washington. I'm very comfortable just saying this is George Washington and I need to get them to think. I think they're still more excited about just sitting down and recording their comment than they are about thinking deeply about it. And so I need to push at least the ones that are still doing that to really be thinking about that more. Part of it is they're first graders and so the text becomes a challenge for them. But a lot of it is I think that looking at things in the distant past really requires that they see the realities of it. It's hard for them to picture it. It's hard for them to picture what life was like when I was a child. So if they can see the clothing they wore, the tools they used, the way they got around their daily life through portraits and things it really helps them have a better understanding of it.