VoiceThread

This link showed up on Clay's Daily Diigo snippets the other day and followed it, and I am thankful that I did. Regardless of its classroom applications, Voicethread is an invaluable resource. If you haven't been to their site and played around, here is a short preview of what you can create there:



The premise is fairly simple: upload images, record your voice as you narrate the story, or the story of that image. However, it gets even better when you share it with others because they can add their take on that image as well, and it all becomes part of the story. As soon as I began playing around, the possibilities became immense for me. Personally, I instantly started remembering pictures of events that took place in my childhood that my sisters and I have differing opinions on, thus completely different stories. This allows for multiple points of view on the same image. In that vein, pictures of conferences (there is a direct import from Flickr feature here) where discussions can be furthered using audio form and then posted for more collaboration long after the initial meeting.

If we want to take this into the classroom as a creative tool, or as an analytical tool, we can. Have students create stories with multiple points of view. Group storytelling takes on a whole new dimension here. Or, take picture of major current events story (I like what the folks at Daylife are doing with photojournalism), and have your students add their audio take to it. Shazam! Instant talking points for class discussion.

I love this stuff!