Introduction to Voicethread


Introduction to Voicethread in 5-minutes

Examples of Educational uses of Voicethread

• Personal Introductions for online courses
• Presentations with slides and audio, or even video.
• Digital story telling
• Support for ESL students / alternative for 
• Language learning
• Collaborating between schools
• Engaging students in dialogue on an issue
• Brainstorming
• Problem Solving
• Explaining Scientific processes
• Commentry on a Poem
• Student e-portfolios
• Assessment tasks using text and audio commentaries

Extra Resources

VoiceThread - Digital Library:  Good examples with teacher notes.

This Livebinder is a good place to start looking for resources too http://www.livebinders.com/play/play_or_edit?id=3680

Voicethread and SEN - Article
http://voicethread.com/media/misc/support/JTECVoiceThread.pdf

and of coure Tom Barrett's Crowd source
 







Voicethread Challenge for Science Teachers and Students.

Voicethread is a wonderful tool for student interaction.  It is intuitive to use, and lets students comment in a variety of ways to suit their confidence.  With little training a whole class can all participate in the creation of a multimedia gem which will capture the key concepts, support less confident students and allow the most able to shine. See my introductory Voicethread post if you don't know VT is!  

Voicethread Challenge for Science Teachers and Students.

"Write up" your next lab experiment with a whole class on the Interactive Whiteboard, using Voicethread.

Image: Phoebe Oreilly

Depending on your class size you may prefer to ask students to write up the experiment in your usual way, and call up groups of students to participate at the whiteboard in turn.

Have the following four files ready to upload.

1. A Photo of the experiment apparatus
2. Word document - results table
3. Excel graph of the results
4. Conclusion / Evaluation questions - as a PowerPoint slide.

The Challenge  (PDF - "Handout" )

1. Upload the four different file types about the experiment into a new Voicethread (VT).
2. Comment on the new VT as a whole class at the interactive whiteboard using one account and different Identities.
1. Type or record with a microphone comments to describe the method on the first slide,
2. Use comments to describe the results in the table on slide two.
3. Doodle on the graph while recording with the microphone to show trends in the results, outliers, scatter of data, reliability of data etc.
4. Give answers to the conclusion / evaluation questions on slide 4
5. Set a homework for the class to add further comments.
6. Please leave a link to the finished project and a few words in the comment box below.

Top Tips for success.

1. Check your Network & Security settings allow website access to microphone and webcam
   look at the VT Network Requirements, or pass them to your network administrator.
2. Test your volume settings before recording comments. (right click over VT- choose settings)
3. Avoid overlaps between Powerpoint images and words ( or use pdf )
4. Students copying and pasting vast blocks of text as a comment
5. Student shyness about talking into a microphone
6. Upgrade to free "educator VT" to get 50 free Voicethreads.
7. Join in conversations at the beginning.
8. Give students chance to plan their contributions before speaking. (nice handout)
9. If you want to avoid risks yourself let the students upload the images for you.

Advantages: Lino-it & Wallwisher - lino wins

Advantages: Lino-it & Wallwisher - lino:

Having spent twenty minutes playing with Lino-it I'm convinced it is a better sticky note tool.  However the two main disadvantages are:

1. It takes a little longer to get used to Lino-it than Wallwisher
2. It has a sticky note Google ad on every canvas.

Otherwise I'm pretty positive that I can use this in lessons with students for all of the following:

• Brainstorming previous knowledge
• Collating information / images / videos on a topic
• Collaborative project work
• Getting students to respond to a text or a graph or a video.
• Book Reviews - Vocabulary exercises
• Collecting Web-links
• Plenary activities

In fact all of the things I suggested Wallwisher might be used for on this Wallwisher wall

Here is a Lino "Canvas" I made in 20 minutes...

 Lino-it would be a nice notice board for a project which lasted a few lessons.
The ability post sticky notes with attachements of files and to set due dates seems pretty useful.

'via Blog this'