Story
(If for any reason the embedded VoiceThread does not appear you can find it here).
A VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slide show that is easy to create, share and embed. It allows people to comment using voice, video, or text. It is not necessary to install any software to use and it takes just a few minutes to get a conversation up and running.
Though VoiceThread can be used with just one voice to tell a completed story, the strength of this medium in EFL, apart from its incredible ease of use, is the way it can house an ongoing discourse in multiple voices. A slide show can be commented on easily by anyone, rather like a blog. I had thought of using Photopeach, but VoiceThread offers the advantage of allowing spoken commentary and allowing for multiple voices in the same space, added at different times.
My story is a description of my favorite time of year. I am alone in this conversation at the moment, but there could be many more participants. It is designed not as something finished, but as something to be added to. If you feel like joining me, you need only register with VoiceThread. It is so easy that you don’t even need to leave this blog post (in which my story is embedded) to contribute.
VoiceThread is a public space, therefore the implications for educational use must be considered. My VoiceThread story is an example to stimulate my EFL students and to model what they could create. I originally wanted to create something more personal using photos of family and friends, as this is the topic of my Moodle course. Though it was easy to make my story invisible on the VoiceThread site and to moderate all comments before they appear, it is possible that someone outside the class will see the work in its embedded form. Therefore this example is impersonal, as I would encourage my students to avoid giving out personal information.
An alternative educational use of VoiceThread in EFL would be for the teacher to post images on a thread and ask the students to record comments. This would work well for getting students to make say suppositions or to practice describing. However, I like the idea of allowing students to create their own threads, either individually or in groups and then leave comments to each other. In this way, it makes the act more authentic, allowing them to personalize their English learning experience using the target language to talk about things of interest.
Perhaps VoiceThread is not the most sophisticated of the story telling tools we have seen this week, but it is perfect for the story I wish my students to tell. There are many more options for written communication on the Web, but EFL students need practice speaking. This has been a dilemma during the design of my Moodle course for beginner EFL students. I had originally thought of using Audacity for students to create podcasts, and then have them accompanied with a collage created in Picasa. However, this would have required the students to download and install software, and I am sure that they would have spent more time on working the medium than the message. VoiceThread is entirely cloud based and students are just a few clicks away from creating and sharing their conversations.