New Uses for VoiceThreads in the New Year!

What is VoiceThread you might ask?

Simply put, according to its developers, VoiceThread is an application that allows you to simulate a real conversation online. Basically, you create a slideshow of one or more media artefacts. With these media artefacts, you can do a voice over online using your computer's microphone, a video using your webcam, or you can add text prompting viewers to make certain comments. Your audience then can make comments that surround your artefacts. Similarly to you the author, they can add these comments as recorded, videoed, or typed responses. They also have the potential to use a drawing tool to circle or draw over your media item to make certain points as they are making their comments! When future viewers watch your VoiceThread, what they see is a basic movie of your media items, your comments, and all the comments of people who discussed the item. They in turn can then add their own comments and add to the VoiceThread "discussion".

I must admit, I've used VoiceThread before, but have not been overly dedicated to it. I remember the first time a professor prompted my masters class to use VoiceThread about six or seven years ago. At the time, I recall long wait times for buffering, but remember thinking that it was a pretty cool idea to link images and documents to recordings of your voice. Historically low Internet download speeds in my countries of residence, however,  have always seemed to hinder my enjoyment of what should have been a quite useful application. Kids in my experience have generally found it frustrating when their machines have gotten stuck recording and listening to recordings. Also, I tended to only see this app as another tool with which one or two students could illustrate their understandings with an online, voiced over, slideshow.

It seems now though that my frustrations with VoiceThread were shortsighted. Checking into to its development two years after I last tried it, VoiceThread seems to have come of age. Now I find that Internet speeds are sufficient at my school in Cambodia to make it a powerful and versatile tool to record classroom discussions.

Just this week I used it to record my class' first ideas about immigration and push pull factors associated with it. I posted three pictures on a new VoiceThread of different sorts of human migration: one was of refugees fleeing a conflict zone; another showed airline passengers waiting to go through passport control; another showed economic refugees walking surreptitiously over broken barbed wire.
On each slide I wrote questions using the visual discovery method of introducing a topic. With the first slide, of war refugees, I asked students to respond to the prompt, "What do you see in this picture?" With the second slide, showing people in passport control, I asked, "What are people doing in this picture?" In the third picture, of economic refugees coming across barbed wire, I asked, "What makes this picture different from previous pictures?" When the VoiceThread was set up, and I had registered my students individually on VoiceThread, I sent the link to all my students through Gmail.

After this, I showed students around the data projector in my classroom how to use basic functions of VoiceThread on another example slide that I had created focused around one of my students' posters on a previously studied topic. I showed students how to open VoiceThread from their link, how to view my comments, how to type, record, and video comments and how to use the drawing tool. I then had students use school netbooks to log on to the immigration VoiceThread I had created. I then challenged all students to be the first to add to the comments around my first slide. If students had finished comments on each slide, I instructed them to then comment on other comments that their classmates were making! Students enjoyed the activity and stayed engaged by it. Afterwards, I had students sit on the carpet, and each student read his or her comments and we had further discussions about migration. I hope in the future to actually have microphones and webcams for them to use to add more complex responses or to help certain students contribute who might have difficulty with writing, typing, or English.

There I had it! My students had a great introduction to our central idea, and we have a record to refer to as we proceed through our inquiry. We could even go back and add to this conversation later. VoiceThread helped us to change a conversation we HAD as a class to one we are HAVING and WILL HAVE throughout the unit!

Please post other ideas you have for how to use this great tool on this blog through your comments.