1) A third grade teacher had her students create autobiographies and record themselves reading them to include in a slideshow for parent-teacher conferences. 2) Students went through a writing process that included prewriting, drafting, revising, typing their work into PowerPoint, and recording their voices. 3) The finished product was a movie file saved to a DVD that played during conferences, and parents enjoyed seeing and hearing their children's work.

1. Technology Integration:
Third Grade Class
Autobiographies
By Jennifer Cline

2. Introduction
My third grade class made an autobiography
slideshow for parent-teacher conferences. The
final product was a slideshow movie that played
during the conferences.
Each student progressed through the writing process
over a period of eight school days. The process
included prewriting by making an idea web, using
the idea web to write a rough draft, using the
revised rough draft to write a final draft, typing
the final draft into a PowerPoint slide, and
recording students’ voices as they read their
completed autobiographies.

3. Learning Objectives
• Utah Core Curriculum, Language Arts, 3rd grade
– Standard 8, Objective 6, Indicator (a): Produce
personal writing (e.g., journals, friendly notes and
letters, personal experiences, family stories,
literature responses).
– Standard 8, Objective 6, Indicator (g): Publish 4-6
individual products.

4. Pre-Technology Lessons:
Pre-Write
• First, we learned how to
make an idea web to
organize the information
we were going to write
about.
• Each autobiography (and
each web) was to have four
paragraphs. Their subjects
were as follows:
– 1) introducing the student
– 2) their family and where they
were from
– 3) what they liked to do when
they were not at school
– 4) a story about something
interesting that happened to
them

5. Pre-Technology Lessons:
Drafting
• Next, we learned how to
take the information from
our idea webs and write a
draft from it.
• Students were to have at
least two sentences for
each paragraph.
• Shown here is a draft after I edited it;
we did not have time to teach revision
in class, so I revised the rough drafts
myself.

6. Pre-Technology Lessons:
Final Draft
• After I revised the rough
drafts, the students
used them to write final
drafts.

7. Technology Integration: Typing
• After the students had
completed their final
drafts, they got to type
them into a PowerPoint
slide on one of the class
computers.
• A picture of each student
was added into their
slides, and the students
got to choose the
backgrounds for their
individual slides.

8. Technology Integration: Typing
• There were five desktops
in the classroom, so
students took turns over
a few days to type in their
autobiographies.
• We also used the
teacher’s computer (see
next slide) and a laptop
that was shared among
the third grade
classrooms.

9. Technology Integration: Recording
• The teacher had
purchased a microphone
for students to use in
recording their
narrations. They each
took turns during breaks
such as recess and lunch
to record their voices
under the teacher’s
supervision at his
computer.

10. Finishing the Product
• After the students had finished
making their slides, we saved
the slides as .jpg files and
imported them into Windows
MovieMaker.
• We also imported the
students’ narrations as .wav
files.
• After a few adjustments, we
then published the entire
project by saving it onto a DVD Here you can see what my finished slide
as a movie file. looked like.

11. Things that Worked Well
• The students loved hearing their own voices
reading their own work. The microphone
functioned perfectly, and it was very useful for the
students to realize their levels of expression in
reading.
• Parents who viewed the published product loved it!
Some even requested copies for themselves.
• The PowerPoint format worked well for typing in
the final drafts. It gave a ready-made space for the
title, text, and picture.

12. Things that Could Have Been Better
• It took me a while to figure out what program to use to
put the movie together. Also, it took us several tries to
find a way to convert the movie into the desired
format.
• Because of a lack of time, a few students did not get to
type their words themselves; rather, they dictated their
writing to the teachers and we typed it in.
• The students did not get much time to practice reading
their autobiographies, so some read less smoothly than
they could have.

13. What I Would Do Differently
• I would have given the students more time to type their
autobiographies.
• I also would have given students more time to practice
reading before they recorded their voices.
• I would have included instructions on the idea web
template so that students would not have had to ask what
they were supposed to be doing as much.
• I would have allowed more individual writing workshop
time so that students could work more at their own pace.

14. Four Principles of Effective
Technology Instruction
1. Student Use of Technology:
-The students actively used technology to publish their
own products.
2. Technology Use is Essential:
-Without the benefit of the technology used, students'
work could not have been published as effectively. The
students would not have had the chance to hear
themselves speak, which was an eye-opening learning
experience for them.

15. Four Principles of Effective
Technology Instruction
3. Focus on Learning Task:
-The technology used allowed the students to achieve the
learning goal in a new and interesting way. They spent
nearly no time learning to use the technology (partly
because its use was so individually directed by the teacher).
4. Added Value:
-The publishing of the students' products (which was the
learning objective) was much smoother and more refined
than it would have been without the use of this technology.
The process did take us longer than expected to figure out,
but only because it was our first attempt at using the
technology in that way.