www.voicethread.com is a site where people can communicate in various ways, including images, documents, video, and voice. Voicethread documented itself as “…a place for creating and collaborating on digital stories and documentaries, practicing and documenting language skills” (VoiceThread, 2009). People may add audio, pictures, and video to their projects. Students may even add digital drawings (“doodling”) to their projects. Also, VoiceThread supports Microsoft Office applications and pdf documents. If students are not able to contribute their own photos or video, they may import images and video from Flickr, Facebook, or other web-based sites (VoiceThread, 2009).
VoiceThread has addressed the education world by offering a special place for K-12 happenings at ed.voicethread.com. The ability to collaborate will alleviate many issues when students are working to create a digital story or similar project. Students would be able to divide up research tasks and work on separate computers. Currently, when students in my class are collaborating on a project, they must have 1-2 students researching on a computer and 1-2 students creating the PowerPoint. Students can also export their creations so that they may present their projects for classmates. Another advantage to exporting and downloading projects is that teachers may collect projects to add to student e-portfolios. Additionally, teachers may use presentations as a way to document the class progress over time, or as a way to provide information in a quick, concise, and easy way for the students to understand. Assessment is also taken into considerationon ed.voicethread.com. Students can either provide feedback for one another, or, if the teacher unlocks the site, members of the public can comment on the presentation. Feedback can be done in several different ways – by phone (VOIP), by webcam, by audio clip, by typing a comment, or file upload. Users can even re-record, re-write, or delete comments they’ve made.
Personally, this will solve many issues for my classes and I am excited to use it in the near future. Educause (2009) stated: “In providing a simple venue for sharing, creating, and assessing media projects, such applications may promote greater digital literacy and greater enthusiasm for multimedia creation.” I believe it will make a great impact on student collaboration, in that students can truly have equal contribution in an easier way. I am also interested to see if students are able to make more meaningful projects based on the fact that they can use web resources easily and can use many more functions than a general PowerPoint.
Click OK, then it should play
VoiceThread (2009). Retrieved from http://voicethread.com/#home.b409.i848804
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