Voice Thread

With VoiceThread, group conversations are collected and shared in one place from anywhere in the world. A VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images, documents, and videos and allows people to navigate slides and leave comments in 5 ways - using voice (with a mic or telephone), text, audio file, or video (via a webcam). 

One cool thing about this is that you can Share a VoiceThread with friends, students, and colleagues for them to record comments also.Users can doodle while commenting, use multiple identities, and pick which comments are shown through moderation. VoiceThreads can even be embedded to show and receive comments on other websites andexported to MP3 players or DVDs to play as archival movies.

I actually downloaded a Mobile App to my iPad for VoiceThread, now I can read and listen and create from my iPad! :)


Here I left a text comment on Richard Pierce's VoiceThread about Generations and Internet.


And here is a Voice Thread that I created for a future math class.  The benefits of using Voice Thread is that it allows students some creativity and keeps them interested.  How neat is it to be able to see and hear your comments and your fellow students comments on certain topics and problems.  They can learn from each other this way.  One barrier is that some students may be shy and may not want to leave a voice comment, but they can easily leave a text comment instead.  It may be difficult to grade an assigment like this, as there will be various forms of answers, but one way is making it participation points and adding it to a test or something.  It would be a good way to review things so that students can see other students ways of working out problems and such.  I think it is really neat and would like to incorporate it into my future classroom. 


ISTE NETS T standards:  This activity relates to the standards by understanding and developing resources created and effectively used in the classroom.  I used power point to create images to be used in a voice thread that could be used to view and check student achievement.  The standards imply that teachers much "demonstrate fluency in technology systems and the transfer of current knowledge to new technologies and situations," which is clearly shown in this tool.  This is a new technology that students find interesting and captivating and I can prove my fluency and share knowledge with my students this way.

Pecha Kucha

PechaKucha 20x20 is a simple presentation format where you show 20 images, each for 20 seconds. The images forward automatically and you talk along to the images. I created a PechaKucha about Math, since I one day hope to teach math classes.






The way I went about making this was to find pictures and put them into Microsoft Powerpoint, once I had my 20 pictures in on 20 different slides I saved in a jpeg format.  I, then, downloaded  PhotoStory and imported the 20 picture slides that I saved and created a photo story customizing my motion and timing and adding voice.  So I set it to no motion and 20 seconds per slide, then put my voice recording over each slide and saved it into yet another format, .wmv, so that I could upload the video to YouTube.


I found this assignment to be fun, even though I dont like hearing my voice recorded and played back.  I enjoyed looking for pictures and putting narrative with them and hope that using fun pictures can keep the attention of students.  I would use this again in the future and I believe it is a fun way to learn about things for students.  Students like videos and pictures and any break from the common lecture, notes, homework routine.

ISTE NETS T #2 - Design & Develop Digital-Age Learning Experiences & Assessments. (A) Design or adapt relevant learning experiences that incorporate digital tools and resources to promote student learning and creativity.