Katie's Blog

Welcome to Voicethread!

What is Voicethread?

Voicethread is a collaborative, multimedia slideshow that is web-based.  Pictures, files, documents and movies can be uploaded to a Voicethread.  It allows users to comment on slideshows in five different ways which include microphone, telephone, text, audio files and webcams.  Voicethreads can also be doodled on while you are leaving a comment.  Watch the Voicethread below to see what a Voicethread looks like and how you navigate through it.

How do I make a Voicethread?

Check out this link to see my screencast about creating Voicethreads.

Privacy and Sharing

Voicethread creators have the ability to control privacy of their Voicethreads, as well as many different ways to embed them. Check out this video below

Membership

Voicethread offers four different types of memberships that can be found here. There is also a free version but it limits you to creating three Voicethreads.

Applications for Education

Science

Social Studies

Math

Teacher’s can provide homework in a digital format.  The students can comment on the work as well as solve the problems.

Here is a geometry based Voicethread

Reading

This selection shows how a video can be embedded.  The first page of the slideshow would be great reading practice for storytelling.

Writing

Professional Development

This link provides an awesome example of using Voicethread’s for student led parent-teacher conferences.  For additional ideas for using Voicethread click here.

Applications for my classroom

The students that I teach often have a lot of difficulty writing, however they enjoy technology and are motivated by it.  I wanted to find a tool that my students could use where they could display their work, talk about the things they have did, expand on their writing and have conversations.  Voicethread provides all of these opportunities.  I used Voicethread in my own classroom in several different ways.

Here is an example of using Voicethread to present research.  My student wrote an ocean animal report and then created this Voicethread.

Here is another example of how I used Voicethread in my classroom.  As I mentioned above, writing can be difficult for my students and we often encourage them to “say it before they write it.”  This year we worked on elaborating details of stories.  I created this Voicethread to allow my students to provide detail on the given picture.

Analysis

I have found Voicethread to be an excellent tool to use in education.  It provides students a means to interact and respond to media, display their work and describe it.  Teachers are also able to display powerpoints, worksheets, pictures and videos for students to respond to.  A Voicethread is very easy to use and you can make it as sophisticated or unsophisticated as you would like it.

Another wonderful thing about Voicethreads is that you can embed them into blogs.  A teacher can upload a voicethread that they want their students to respond to on the blog and then instead of students only being able to comment on blogposts with writing, they can write, record themselves on a webcam or record their own voice, as well as draw on images all at the same time.

A setback of Voicethread is that the free version only allows you to create three Voicethreads, however for a single educator to have a Voicethread it only costs $60 for the year.  The teacher can have up to 100 students as members, the teacher has an unlimited amount of Voicethreads that they can create and students can create up to 30 Voicethreads.  If it is a tool that you intend to use a lot than I think it is worth the cost.

Voicethread may not be for those educators who are not technologically savy, however I think it would be very easy to teach both adults and students alike how to use it.

My students loved using Voicethread.  They were excited to complete the activities and liked listening and seeing their work. Our 21st century students seem to enjoy displaying their work and completing their work in this interactive environment.

What a Wonderful World…

Here is the new and improved version…not too many changes but I tweaked it a bit. I changed some of the background colors, fixed the sound and added a picture. Enjoy

Augmented Reality

Not a huge John Mayer fan but I came across this the other night when I was looking through YouTube.  Pretty cool if you have not already seen it….

My first attempt at Flash

Scratch

It took me a while to get the hang of Scratch but once I got it I had a lot of fun with it.  You can really get carried away.  I created my Y as a vowel game to help students practice a specific skill we are learning in reading.  Enjoy!

Learn more about this project

Digital Imaging

This was so fun however I did have a few problems copying and pasting. I call this picture, My Worst Nightmare! I took a picture of me kayaking this past summer. Then I pasted two of my biggest fears sharks and geese. The geese was much harder to cut out but for some reason it came out better than the shark. Enjoy!

Google Earth

I had an excellent time using Google Earth.  I decided to plot points of interest in the southeast region of the United States because my social studies class is studying that.  I think this is an activity I might be able to do with my students and I think they will really enjoy it.  In Google Earth  I was able to put in overlay pictures as well as use the outlining tool to outline the Southeast.  I have had some problems recording in Jing.  I made my Google Earth window as small as possible and tried shortening my video but the size is still almost 400MBs.  I have not uploaded the movie because it will take forever, so I am going to show you a couple of snapshots.

Below is the outline of the southeast region using the path tool.  I made the color pink so that you can’t miss it.

This is my first “destination”  Snowshoe Mountain in West Virginia.  I embedded a picture of the mountain in the winter time.

The next stop was the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. I embedded another picture of my family and I in Shenandoah many years ago.

The last stop I am going to share is Churchill Downs in Kentucky, I love how you can see the track from above.

RSS FEEDS

I fooled around a little more with my RSS Feeds and added CNN.com because I seem to check that website most often for news. I have also previously had our class website RSS feed. I have shared my blog with some colleagues and I know they will be interested to see what Craig is posting!

Tutorial on WordMagnets

I had an awesome time doing this. This would have been an excellent tool to create refreshers for the teachers I just taught a class to on Assistive Technology.

Great Link

I found this link and thought there was some excellent resources.  Check it out!