I was chatting to one of our foreign language teachers at school and talking about some of the new Web 2.0 technologies that could be useful in a language classroom. We looked at how blogs could be used, and how to incorporate audio files into things. I suggested using Evoca, which integrates really nicely into Blogger. The idea of getting students to use Evoca to record their voice and then publish to a blog in only three clicks was pretty cool, but it lacked a simple way for the teacher to respond via voice as well.
Then we looked at VoiceThread, and what a cool tool it is. I had heard a lot about it but not really played with it until Jess McCulloch mentioned it again in a recent Virtual Staffroom episode. Intrigued, I just had to check it out. It does look very neat, and as long as kids have bandwidth and a microphone I can imagine some very useful ways to integrate it into the classroom.
Here is a little sample I made from a couple of photos I had on my hard drive… please add your voice (or text) comments to it. I’d like to get a bunch of comments on it so I can show it as an example of how this works to some of my teaching colleagues. Knock yourselves out!
My first Voicethread by Chris Betcher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Chris
I added something for you. First time to do this sort of thing but I am a language teacher and interested in trying to use it myself. I was trying to work out a way to write the Japanese in Japanese, and not using English letters, but the global IME didn’t seem to work. Does anyone know how this can be overcome? Thanks.
Andrew
Hi Chris,
Liked your voicethread experiment. Left a comment or two.
Dennis R
Hi Chris,
I like VoiceThread too, but check out Splashcast, if you haven’t already, for a similar but to me way more flexible tool. Converts PPT and pdf’s to embeddable flash on customizable channels, allows audio recording on those files, and audio comments, more.
Foreign language recognition (non-Latinate characters) is a problem, but what it does, it does very well.
(And I wonder if Andrew considered using the annotate pen on Voicethread as one way to do Japanese characters – not what he was looking for, I know, but possible…)