Mar
31
Voicethread Story
Posted by: Diddly | March 31, 2010 | Leave a Comment
This was my original story, but I have changed it. If you want to see what I did, go to the “Story” page.
I really liked PhotoPeach and I was going to use it to tell my story, but I decided on Voicethread. It has two advantages for my context. FIrstly it allows for audio as well as text. Secondly, it is collaborative. If anyone else subscribes then they can add comments to my photos as well, (and their avatar would appear on the side of the image just as mine does).
Photopeach is really good, but I was looking for an easy way to get students to speak rather than just write. There are many more opportunities for writing than there are for speaking. I designed my little life story, not as a material to use with my students, but as an example for my students. I want them to produce their own voicethread, working in groups.
I want to create ways for beginner students of English to personalize their learning environment and find as many multimodal ways to use the English they have to express them selves authentically. The idea of having them find images of their environment, their hometown, their interests, and their family is that it is intrinsically motivating. The idea of them working together in mixed ability groups where they comment on a group thread is that it gets them into a zpd. They are interested, and they want to understand each others’ comments, so they actively look for meaning.
It was mildly tricky to subscribe to Voicethread as I had to lie and say I was a K-12 school, but once that was out of the way, I had no problems. Voice thread is just great, and I could easily take my students down to the computer center and get them all registered in 15 minutes. You can upload your own photos, or use photos from Flickr commons directly, so it is really easy. Why not try it out and comment on one of my photos?