EdCompBlog: VoiceThread

Saturday, October 20, 2007

VoiceThread

Those of you who have read previous EduFlickr posts will know that one of the reasons I like Flickr is because it gives students adifferent way of telling stories (for example EduFlickr: Telling Tales). Thanks to a recent David Warlick Podcast (Episode 84: Bloggers’ Cafe at NECC 2007) I heard about a new (well new to me) web service called VoiceThread.

It looks interesting. Photos can be posted and then any number of people can add text or voice comments to the picture - they can even doodle on top of the photo to highlight or add to the information. It is therefore easy to gather a variety of views on a single event or picture. It is also possible to link a number of photos together and gather different comments on each photo.

Photos can be uploaded from your computer or imported directly from Flickr and Facebook. However, you are not just limited to threading photos together. You can upload Powerpoint documents, Adobe Documents, Word Documents, Excel Spreadsheets and videos. How useful would that be in the classroom? Post a Powerpoint presentation, or some other document and get your class to comment. Everyone gets three threads for free but teachers can apply for a free educator account.

The final trick is you can embed the thread in a blog, web page or whatever. Here are three I made earlier showing three different ways of linking to the thread: large, small and text link.

View this VoiceThread on the site.

VoiceThread about Computer Labs.