Saturday, May 3, 2008

Voicethread

Voicethread is one of my favourite tools for the classroom. Voicethread is a slideshow of images that you upload, but the big difference is that others can leave comments on these pictures in the form of text, audio or video, and also use a pen tool to write on the screen.
Here's a video to introduce Voicethread to you

Now you will be starting to get ideas on how you can use this in the classroom.
You will need to go to Voicethread and sign up - it's free. This will give you 3 free voicethreads, but if you upgrade to an Educational account (also free) you can have unlimited voicethreads. You will need to apply and they will send an email to the school address you nominate to verify you are a teacher, so don't forget to tell the receiver of the email that it will be arriving.

Let's go to Voicethread and begin. Log in and click create.
Firstly you will upload some pictures you have prepared.

Each one of these pictures will be a new pages. You can change the order by dragging the picture.

You can add comments now, or you can leave it until later for others to add. Click the typewriter if you text comment, the camera if you want video comment, or the mic if you want audio comment.


Now click on the share button. You will need to make sure your Voicethread is public if you want it to be viewable on your blog.


When you are ready to embed your Voicethread into your blog you will need to get the embed code. Remember that you can continue to edit your Voicethread and it will automatically update in your blog - you don't need to re-embed it.
Click embed and pick up the code

and paste it into the html tab view on your blog, as we have done before.

A great feature of Voicethread is that you can make new identities. This means that you can make identities for each student in your class, without them needing an email address or having to register. This is wonderful for junior classes. Here is a Voicethread explaining how to do this.


Enjoy.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

i cant hear about this fantastic tool before when i tried its really good and easily manageable.thanks BrainDumps