Sunday, August 26, 2007

VoiceThread

VoiceThread

This is a cool tool. You upload photos for a slideshow, then you can comment (audio or text) on each of the pictures. What's better, though, is that others can also comment.

Here is my sample (terrible production value, but I can work on that). It is a few pictures from a 4th of July parade. http://voicethread.com/view.php?b=5299&invite=4AbMIeWWvU.

I'd like to point out the URL above. You can share this slideshow with others, but it has to be make public to embed in a blog (external website). So, I created a friend (my other email) and "shared" the show with that friend. That led me to this URL. While I don't mind my presentation being public, I don't really want all users of that site to be dropping in and leaving messages. This would be particularly problematic if you were using this for a class. So, either get all of your students in your friends list, I do something like I described above so you can post a link to the content.

This could be a great tool to elicit iCBT-type test responses from your students, or other contributions of voice or text. While it does not work as a threaded discussion, you could have serial discussions through this medium, which is similar to what you get with most blog commenting features.

This might also be good for tutorials. Users could see a screenshot or other images and listen to or read the instructions/descriptions. I picture this as being good to use in one window with the software interface in another window (using audio puts less focus on the image, but it's there if they need it).

Dan

Sunday, August 5, 2007

Teachers vote to ban internet | The Register

Teachers vote to ban internet | The Register

Oh My! The Luddites are calling from Brittain.

These folks make your network admins look reasonable.

Dan