We've all had the experience of wishing there were an easy way to generate speaking activities online that were meaningful and productive, not to mention grade-able.
Voicethread has been around for a while, but I'm still surprised by how few of my colleagues and teacher-friends use it. So here is an attempt to get more people on board. First of all, Voicethread is free. The basic account costs nothing, and it allows users to share images, video, audio, and webcam streams at the touch of a mouse button. The interface is simple and deceptively easy to use for the power that lies under the hood. Let me give you an few examples to help you see it in action.
Speaking Journals
This is one of my favorite online activities. It usually involves using a video prompt to guide my students in creating a verbal response. In the past, I would embed flash video of me presenting a topic and then asking for a multi-leveled response from my students. I then used the Moodle mp3 recorder module to allow my students to record their responses and upload them via a Moodle assignment.
This worked well enough, but my students often had browser problems with the mp3 recorder
, or simply submitted any number of different formats via the Moodle assignment.
With Voicethread, the media is embedded in the interface and students can respond via text, voice, or webcam stream. It's all one tidy little package. What's more, there is a Voicethread module for Moodle that allows the students to submit their Voicethreads via virtually any form in Moodle. That means Voicethread recordings can be submitted easily as homework (allowing quick grading as well), added to any forum, or even used in student profiles.
Images, text, and whiteboard marker
Students are not limited to simply submitting text, voice or webcam streams, they can also submit images and video to which they can add narration, text annotations, or even whiteboard drawing. My own experience with this sort of flexibility is that it creates an attractive environment in which students can create narratives about themselves or any topic they are given. The images and video give the students background about which they tend to speak more energetically and in greater detail.
Asynchronous Learning
I've also had experience with using Voicethread as a tool to connect students in different time zones. We used Voicethread to connect students at KAIST with students from Kwansei Gakuin University in Japan. My collaborator in Japan, Steven Moinester, and I required our students to participate actively in team-based Voicethreads we had set up. As a result, they were able to carry on extended conversations using video, audio, text and images for several months. The final products were very interesting intercultural artifacts that provide compelling evidence of the value of this sort of technology in asynchronous language learning.
Test and Test Preparation
Voicethread can also be used as a testing and/or test preparation tool. Educators can create video content that simulates dialogs, interviews and other test-worthy interactions. Students can start their webcam streams, then begin watching the video, and provide spoken answers to questions or prompts. In this way, multiple students can be interviewed either online from their own locations, or together in a multimedia lab. There are a multitude of great uses for Voicethread. If you have some of your own idea, chime in here. To join a longer discussion, please visit the forum thread that has been created for this post.
Rude comments will be edited to make you look goofy.