Voicethreads

**Definition**

VoiceThread is an online media presentation using conversation through voice, video, text, or images (Solomon & Schrum, 2010). Students are able to have a conversation with a worldwide audience. The audience is able to interact with the students by giving immediate feedback through commenting or asking questions. The feedback can be video, audio, or text. Drawings or illustrations can also supplement the conversation and feedback.

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**History**

VoiceThread is not just another post and share site to let everyone see what was done over the weekend. Anyone who has access to the document can post comments, text or audio, to be shared with everyone else. This amazing new piece of technology was created at the University of North Carolina, so students would be able to add more depth to their postings on the internet (Educause, 2008). VoiceThread allows the user to add the subtle nuance -- mood, personal style, humor or irony -- that only a person's voice can lend to a conversation.

Ninety percent of VoiceThread's users are in the education field. Steve Muth, cofounder of VoiceThread, was quoted as saying, “For all of the talk of the web 2.0 tools and social interaction, the truth is that these tools have not penetrated beyond the surface level consisting of the ‘edtech elite.’ We really want to reach the other 95% who don’t use the web beyond email, or perhaps their LMS (Learning Management System) interfaces” (Berman, 2009). A number of colleges and universities around the United States have encouraged the use of VoiceThreads to increase the depth of its education. At the University of Connecticut, their writing program has been using VoiceThreads to encourage the practice of digital storytelling. Sierra College has been using VoiceThreads in its distance learning courses to make it feel more like a face to face setting for students (Educause, 2008). A number of education abroad programs have used Voicethread to provide a venue for students to share and narrate pictures, respond to experiences, etc.

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**VoiceThread Use in One School**

To investigate the integration of Voicethread into instruction, we surveyed two teachers who had used it (these were the only two teachers we found who had implemented the technology.) Both were foreign language teachers; one was an author of this paper, using VoiceThread for the first time. It is perhaps not surprising that foreign language teachers are among the first users of this technology, as it permits recording of oral output in response to a prompt. A persistent limitation in practicing and assessing speaking skills in a foreign language class is time. Quality assessments often require one-on-one time between teacher and student, and if the assessment takes place during class time, assessing all students can take a substantial amount of class time, crowding out other instructional activities. VoiceThread permits students to record speech during class time or as homework and allows other students and the teacher to hear and respond to it at their leisure. Recorded responses allow the teacher to listen to a response several times and compare one student with another; fairness and consistency in grading may thereby be enhanced.

** Survey results **

Teacher A is a young, tech-savvy German teacher who uses a variety of technologies to connect her students with the German-speaking world. She has used VoiceThread as a free substitute for PowerPoint (which student netbooks do not have), as a place to record a variety of German accents for students to hear, and as a way to get students to combine visuals and verbal output in simple, engaging class projects for which she can assess accent and overall oral proficiency. In terms of ease of use, she has found VoiceThread mostly easy to use, though she has been unable to get the drawing tool to synchronize with the voice (there is a significant lag time). The tool is not a time saver for the most part, nor does she expect it to enhance learning outcomes. She did feel that the tool was particularly engaging and fun to use.

Unfortunately, only one of her students responded to the survey; she sent it to students who had done a significant VoiceThread activity last year. That student's results were similar to those obtained by teacher B, so they will be discussed together with those results.

Teacher B (one of the authors of this paper) is an older, not-so-tech-savvy teacher. Her primary reason for trying VoiceThread was to lower the barriers to systematic, quality assessment of Spanish-speaking skills. She does not expect the tool to replace face-to-face interaction for learning purposes but for assessment.

Her VoiceThread projects provided students with visual and oral prompts (historic photographs, written questions, and oral instructions). The students were required to describe and respond to what they saw. The goal was to have them demonstrate their mastery of key vocabulary and historical facts.

This teacher’s experience of VoiceThread was that the initial start-up costs were quite high. It took several hours to explore instructional uses of VoiceThreads, design and create her first VoiceThread assignment, share it with all her students, do a trial run, work out some kinks, find several headsets to use, and set up laptops in the classroom to permit several students to record simultaneously. Getting each student registered took time, some students re-recorded several times, some accidentally erased other's recordings, and in the end only eight students had recorded by the end of a full class period. This is far fewer than could have been interviewed in person during the same period of time.

One challenge of this technology at RHS is that most school computers lack microphones and speakers, and the school owns very few headsets (and does not want to encourage their use because of the unsanitary nature of shared headsets.) The few headsets the school does own are scattered in several classrooms. On the positive side, the second VoiceThread took much less time to create than the first, and subsequent set-ups will be relatively straightforward.

Student opinions varied somewhat, but overall most students were fairly neutral in regards to the technology. What some liked best was that they were less nervous talking to the computer than they would have been talking with the teacher in person, and they liked that they could re-record if it went badly. They also found VoiceThread time-consuming and mildly complicated. For the most part, they were neither enthusiastic, nor did they hate it.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">** Summary of advantages of VoiceThread **
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">it is a free tool for creating individual or collaborative multimedia presentations
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">it is a simple way to record oral output
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">it permits asynchronous conversations in response to a given prompt (such as a video, picture, or spoken question or statement)
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">it may be good for ELLs and others who benefit from more time to think about their answer, and for those who may be shy about participating in a face-to-face classroom discussion
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">responses may be oral or in writing and may even be telephoned in
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">it permits assessment of oral production outside of class time which is good for students who like to do things on their own time

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">** Summary of disadvantages of VoiceThread **
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">while the software is free, using it demands more hardware than many school computers have (microphones, speakers or headphones, webcams, etc.)
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">making use of the technology outside of class time depends on student internet access outside of the classroom
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">there may be extra start-up costs for equipment like microphones
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">getting an entire class proficient in the technology so that students could work with it outside of class would require an up-front investment in time
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">some glitches, such as the inability to synchronize the drawing tool and voice, may be problematic
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">if the greatest advantage of Voicethread is the opportunity to let students record speech outside of class, then it will not be a successful tool for those students with many outside responsibilities or a lack of internet access at home

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">**Future Direction**

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The creators of VoiceThread hope to revolutionize online education through the use of their new technology. From the feedback of users, VoiceThread has been able to modify their product to better meet the needs of their consumers. Many long distance learning programs have begun to supplement their lessons by adding VoiceThread demonstrations and discussions (Educause, 2009). VoiceThread would work well in many high school subjects, but it will most likely be the foreign language classes that will make VoiceThread popular in the K-12 venue.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22px;">Teacher survey: <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">[|https://docs.google.com/a/ripon.k12.wi.us/spreadsheet/viewform?hl=en_US&formkey=dFc1LUVYUXBRM3RMREVzNDVXdEFvSkE6MA#gid=0]

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22px;">Student survey: <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">[|https://docs.google.com/a/ripon.k12.wi.us/spreadsheet/viewform?hl=en_US&formkey=dHdnbkU5dzBZb2NuZS1pMjRGNkxUc3c6MA#gid=0]