the network for middle school math and science teachers

Voicethread

Has anyone tried voicethread.com? If you have not, you don't know what you are missing. This is a wonderful program where students post a slide, picture, peice of work, math equation, etc and then they make discuss it through a microphone. Then after they give their presentation online through voicethread, their peers or teachers or whoever wants to or is given access, can make comments regarding the topic. It is wonderful. I used it as an end of the year summary, What I learned this year and the kids did a great job and the comments to each other were so productive, such as "Hey I remember learning about the parts of an atom, I also remember learning that the proton and neutron are in the nucleus." It showed student learning and peer evaluations, it was awesome. It is a free service but for classrooms it is best to an account and it is very inexpensive. I highly recommend this program, students of all ages can do this. It is great.
go to www.voicethread.com

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Rebecca Lawson on June 15, 2009 at 7:59pm

Leigh,

I haven't used Voicethread, but this sounds really interesting.

How did the students record so that the noise of the classroom was not a problem?
When my students tried to do podcasting last year, any little noise in the classroom
could be heard on the recording.

Thanks for the great ideas!
Rebecca

Permalink Reply by Karolee Smiley on June 15, 2009 at 8:06pm

This looks very interesting. Being web-based, it opens it up to student access from any online source. That is a flexibility you can not get from GarageBand, IMovie, Audacity or MovieMaker (programs that I have used). I might give it a try this summer to see what all I could do. Thanks for the suggestion!

Unfortunately, I don't think I could manage the level to create an account for each student. That looks like it would be around $120 a year. That was about my entire budget for the year. Hopefully the smaller systems could work. What level of access were you working with?

Permalink Reply by Lisa on June 15, 2009 at 8:27pm

Hi Leigh,

I worked with a class of 7th graders who were learning geographic features such as bog, lagoon, plateau. They each designed a digital poster for their term. They had to have a photograph which was registered with a creative commons license. Once each student had a poster completed, it was uploaded to Voicethread. Each student explained the term on the poster and used the doodling feature. Once all the posters were uploaded and narrated, the students commented on each others posters giving feedback based on a rubric they had been given before they designed their posters. Finally, students used the VoiceThread to take a short quiz on the geographic terms. The students were very engaged in this assignment. They expressed they found the finished product of over 65 geographic terms helpful for studying. The parents enjoyed listening to the students as they explained the geographic posters.

Permalink Reply by Kim Lightle on June 18, 2009 at 11:23am

Rebecca - That is a good point about audio quality. I've looked at lots of class made videos in SchoolTube and TeacherTube and the audio is so bad I can't even hear what anybody is saying. Any ideas on how to keep the audio quality high? Kim

Rebecca R. Lawson said:

Leigh,

I haven't used Voicethread, but this sounds really interesting.

How did the students record so that the noise of the classroom was not a problem?
When my students tried to do podcasting last year, any little noise in the classroom
could be heard on the recording.

Thanks for the great ideas!
Rebecca

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