VoiceThread School-Wide Project
I am posting the following school project I am planning on introducing to our entire faculty in the next few weeks. If any of my teachers are reading this …congratulations… you have advanced notice 
This time the approach to the collaborative project is internal. I am involving all grade levels (Pre-K through 6th grade) within our school. It is going to involve creating avatars for all our students, which I will leave up to the teachers to have them created with KidPix, hand-drawn/scanned in or using clipart. Pull together what students have learned about Egypt through the Egypt Blog and their individual class units that are in progress throughout the rest of the school year.
VoiceThread.com is an amazing application, that holds great promise for the classroom.
A VoiceThread is an online media album that can hold essentially any type of media (images, documents and videos) and allows people to make comments in 5 different ways – using voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (with a webcam) – and share them with anyone they wish. A VoiceThread allows group conversations to be collected and shared in one place, from anywhere in the world.
It can be used for collaborative digital storytelling at ALL grade levels. Please sign-up for a free Pro- account (for educators) with your school’s e-mail by going to the main site. As alway, please don’t hesitate to let me know if you need any help in the process.
Once you have your own account, you will create additional identities for your students under your main account. To add these identities go to “My Account” and “Add an Identity”. Please keep in mind that you will use first names only for your students. Upload an avatar (a visual ‘handle’ or display appearance you use to represent yourself online) for yourself and your students. We can plan on creating an avatar for your students during your time in TechConnect. This could be a clipart from the Microsoft clipart gallery, drawing in KidPix or a scanned image that your students’ drew.
I have created a voicethread called “Jose, the bear travels to Egypt“. You will be taken directly to the voicethread by clicking on the link. The voicethread is set to Public (so anyone can see it), but limited to invited users (from our school) to comment.
I have uploaded several photos from Jose’s Egypt trip and arranged them in chronological order.
You are able to choose “on” which image you want to leave an audio or written comment or message by clicking on that image. You then can choose the record button to directly record with an attached microphone, upload a previously recorded sound file or type a comment by pressing the “type” button. VoiceThread also allows the option to use a telephone to leave a comment or use a webcam to leave a video message.
Make sure you have the correct identity of each student selected before they are recording or typing the message. You can embed Jose’s story into your blog and allow everyone to follow along as the story grows and grows by our comments. Make sure you are clicking on the “Embed” button
and then copy (CTRL-C) and then past (CTRL-V) into the Code tab of your blog post.
Why are we creating a storybook together as a school?
To show…
- … that we are a learning community.
- … the younger students that learning never ends (even for us teachers).
- … that we are learning and working together across grade levels and subject areas.
- … that we are creating and sharing what we are learning with the rest of the world.
And if all of this is not enough…
The voicethread will be an unique story about Jose’s adventure in Egypt. As the teacher make sure that each students comment is constructive and demonstrates student learning about Egypt’s history, culture and traditions.
Here are a few links to other blog posts that discuss the use of VoiceThread in the classroom.
Look at some examples of using voicethread in the classroom
Thank you for this blog posting …what a great resource. I have been reading a variety of blogs, wikis and tweets showing a variety of projects with voice thread and was looking forward to doing one myself. This is a great resource to use to refer to as I get started.
Also, on a personal note, thank you for commenting on my blog. In the last month I have been trying a lot of new resources that I have been discovering. Your words were very encouraging and although I haven’t posted in a while I have several posts in draft form…. Stay tuned!
This post came at a perfect time for me – I am planning to work this weekend on setting up a project for our sixth graders. Although I’ve played with Voicethread a little, your post has filled in lots of details and thus will save me lots of time! Thanks!
What a terrific post about your application of VoiceThread and kudos to you for detailing so well how to set it up and use it for others.
I noticed the link to mathcasts at the bottom went to a VT on Fair Use so I’d like to suggest you change it to our K-12 Mathcasts 500 project which is entirely VoiceThread based. The link to it is http://math247.pbwiki.com/K-7+Mathcasts+500+Project.
Thanks! — Tim
Tim
Thank you for noticing the wrong link. I fixed it and it should point to the pbwiki link you had suggested.
MatchCast is an amazing resource on what can be done collaboratively with VoiceThread. Truly an inspiration. Thanks!
Sylvia! This is HUGE! I am going to send it to the people I just had in my Voicethread workshop and link to it in my workshop wiki! Superb! Thanks so much! -kj-
I literally discovered Voice Thread just moments ago via Classroom 2.0, and so it is like kismet that you would have posted here about it.
Sylvia, what do you see as the potential for Voice Thread in beginning and intermediate level world language courses/classes?
Miss Profe
I think that VoiceThread is ideal for language classes. It combines voice, text AND images to make a CONVERSATION. What a great way to practice the target language for our students. Mix in some global collaboration with native speakers and we have almost the real thing.
Check out this voicethread of a teacher from New Zealand and her personal journey of learning Spanish.
Lots of possibilities.
[...] ready to participate with their students on our school wide Egypt VoiceThread. About a month ago, I posted my ideas and step by step instructions for the teachers to the project. Since then I have presented [...]
I am collecting examples of how educators are using Voicethread in their classroom or for professional development on a wiki at: http://voicethread4education.wikispaces.com/
My plan is to share these examples with other technology teachers who provide professional development in their schools.
Feel free to add your own examples or links to resources. Thanks in advance,
Colette Cassinelli
http://www.edtechvision.org
[...] http://langwitches.org/blog/2008/01/11/voicethread-school-project/ A great blog site, which I have RSS to now…many great ideas and [...]
I’ve recently joined and wanted to introduce myself
[...] her blog Langwitches, Silvia Tolisano includes screen shots of VoiceThread and a great explanation how to get educator [...]
It’s really interesting to read about your work as I’m also looking at Voicethread and its use as a Web 2 tool e.g. for improving student confidence in classroom talk. I am currently looking at what research has already been carried out using Voicethread so if you have any other interesting information. experience, comments or I’d like to hear about it. I’m also developing several Voicethreads with my student so I can share other ideas with you
A number of us are carrying out research projects so please get in touch if you are an educationalist interested in sharing ideas about web2.0 in education.
We want to reinvent the art of learning.