Blog 7 - VoiceThread and where it could take us

My mission this week was to explore a multimedia sharing site. Before I headed over to VoiceThread, I checked out a few sites extolling the virtues and explaining the uses of same site. VoiceThread seems like a mixture of a number of the Web 2.0 tools we’ve been exploring- blogs, podcasting, YouTube & TeacherTube, photosharing sites, and so on. The possibilities are almost inexhaustible, at least if it isn’t blocked by your school division (I haven’t checked yet if it is available in mine).

If you haven’t seen VoiceThread in use, the following video gives a pretty good example of some of the things you can do with it.



above from http://web2bookmarking.blogspot.com/2008/10/more-on-voicethread.html

Although the video shown above may not automatically suggest myriad educational uses to viewers, hopefully everyone can see that VoiceThread can be a greatly interactive Web 2.0 tool.

Brenda Dyck has written a nicely concise piece of writing on educational possibilities of VoiceThread, which you can read in its entirety here. Dyck makes a good point that student voice as proposed by Dewey is given a great opportunity in this kind of student work and collaboration. For me, Dyck’s suggestion that VoiceThread allows for differentiation is also a strong one; students can speak, listen, view, type comments, and draw with the doodler all in one spot. The kind of integration that lets so many skills, strategies and learning styles all come into play at once seems like a forward move for the technology-driven world we are inheriting.

The kind of student engagement many of us work for daily may have found a friend here with this kind of multimedia application. It would seem hard not to be engaged; using VoiceThread almost seems like play, doesn’t it? You can doodle on a picture, zoom in and out at will to look closer or get the big picture, listen to range of voices (and replay them if you need to). Here’s a young student’s VoiceThread on global warming and its effect on polar bears.



As you can see and hear, the girl who created the presentation has received comments from a far-flung oceanographer, a teacher abroad, friends, family members, and of course many other young people. What’s interesting to me on this site is that there are fruitful comments and silly ones; clearly some people are taking it seriously and some are not, and at leas one is critical. Putting one’s work out there, even if you are a young person, seems to entail being prepared for all kinds of feedback. But that’s what’s good about VoiceThread, postings are meant to be viewed and commented upon by others. The learning process does not stop at creation of a product, it continues through comments made by others (who are not necessarily teachers). Voicethread allows for a unique way of garnering reaction from anywhere and allows commenters to respond in numerous ways. Students may be able to learn something about accepting criticism and disregarding irrelevant comments.

I had some problems using Voicethread myself. I could upload pictures, doodle on them and type comments, but could not record my oral comments. My mic worked fine for other applications such as Audacity, and I worked through VoiceThread’s Help for audio, but I was still unable to record my voice for commenting purposes. Clearly I have a lot more to learn before I can use VoiceThread in the classroom. Here’s what I was working on, please imagine my best deejay voice extolling the virtues of Halloween safety with my sons as examples as you check it out.




http://voicethread.com/share/240744/

While browsing others’ VoiceThreads, I found that others’ comments were also not always audible. Sometimes they were just recorded too quietly for me to make out what they were saying, but sometimes I could not hear anything. Sound on that people had attached to videos was clear, but comments were often not audible. I wonder if anyone else has been dealing with the same problems as I have.

Nevertheless, once I get past my technical problems I think there could be a pretty wide range of uses. First, as mentioned previously, the use of VoiceThreads generally could be fantastic for student voice, student engagement, and differentiated learning. I believe that the ease of visual uploading, doodling and typing comments for almost instant response is more in tune with student expectations these days, with texting and IM occupying more and more of students’ time.

For some of my students who are reluctant to collaborate in small or large group settings, VoiceThread could allow them to voice their comments without that fear of speaking with a whole class watching and listening. I have seen this work when using PhotoStory in the past; students had a lot of fun recording their voice even when they were scared witless by the idea of speaking out loud in class. If this kind of multimedia application were used consistently, especially in more than one course, some students may gain more confidence in their own voice. In the same vein, some young learners may be more comfortable speaking into a mic than to a teacher, so VoiceThread may be able to allow educators one more way for students to show evidence of learning.

One of the easiest ways to get students involved in this sort of collaborative work is to let them browse and comment and then look at some of those threads classmates responded to. Once I iron out my kinks with VoiceThread, that’s where I will start; direct them to some initial threads to get them started, let them browse, then let the sharing and commenting on other classmates’ work. It may take me some time, but I will master VoiceThread; then the fun will begin.