Great Secure Collaborative Network where Students can Find and Share their Voice.
Community Review for VoiceThread
My Take
VoiceThread is an easy to use, fun and engaging tool for students and teachers to use. It is a secure and collaborative network where students can find and share their voice. Students can upload their images or pull from the extensive digital library. They have five ways to leave a comment. Commenting can be done on images, videos and/or presentations. Teachers can upload student names and create class groups. There are great tutorials to use with students. There is an option to remain private, but students can share their work with other students around the world in a safe environment. The only downfall is the fee. There is an individual teacher license for $79 for 15 months. Site licenses are also available. The fee is worth the collaborative, secure and creative features of this tool.
How I Use It
I used this in my computer lab as a creative way for students to get to know one other. They used the "I AM" Poem template to write about themselves and combined that with images in PowerPoint that they uploaded into VoiceThread. Next they recorded their poems in Voicethread. As a second part of the lesson, students learned about commenting and were presented with guidelines. Students then invited their friends from class to comment on their poem. It worked extremely well! The only issue was with students recording at the same time. I decided to let students take turns or record at home to prevent background noise. Of course, they don't have to comment via voice, they can leave comments using text if you prefer. I used VoiceThread to have students reflect on and share their cyberbullying projects.