This week in Instructional Technology our class experienced using the multimedia tool VoiceThread. Voice thread is an Internet-based multimedia tool that allows people to collaborate and share projects, presentations, slide shows, documents, and/or videos. Users can collaborate by supplying comments (voice, text, audio, video, or phone) or adding media to a thread and share it with others and allowing them to make comments as well.

You can sign up for a free account, or upgrade to a number of different "pro" accounts that are tailored to your needs. The K-12 accounts include a pro-educator subscription ($10/yr), a classroom subscription ($60/yr), or a school subscription ($1/per user). An upgraded subscription gives you 10GB+ of storage, the basic/free account limits 2GB storage.

I could see myself using this in the classroom. It would be a great tool for digital story telling, projects, and collaboration among students and other educators. You would need to take the time to walk through the setup and uploading features with your students. You would also need some form of consent from parents that would allow their child's work to be on the internet, even though the VoiceThread can be set to private I would imagine. VoiceThread has a great document on Getting Started with VoiceThread in the classroom, check it out.

There are also some limitations to using this tool in the classroom. If you run VoiceThread on a computer with a somewhat slower processor or Internet connection it doesn't run smoothly. While running VoiceThread on my home computer it was very slow. I could forsee this being a problem in some schools that have old and limited equipment. The recent Flash Player (10) is required to run VoiceThread as well. One other downfall to VoiceTread is that it is an Internet-based application. Thus, it can only be used if you have internet access, unlike using PowerPoint, iMovie, or Microsoft Photo Story which are programs that run from the computer. Any of these said programs or VoiceThread are nonlinear, though, and make it easy for students to be creativite while working on projects or other collaborations. They are able to "save" and come back to their work over and over again.

Overall, I'm intriuiged by VoiceThread and its potential for use in the classroom. I hope that next year I will find different ways that I can incorporate it into the classroom.


Links:
http://www.voicethread.com
http://voicethread.com/help/manuals/
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/PhotoStory/default.mspx