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My first Voicethread

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!

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A Vision of Students Today

Another fascinating video made by Michael Wesch from Kansas State University. Michael was responsible for the very viral “The Machine (Us)ing Us” which clearly made the point about the folksonomic nature of Web 2.0 and how the techniques of tagging and aggregating are causing us to rethink the way we look at information.

This new video was made by getting his class to create and conduct a survey on issues of relevance to them. They used Google Docs to create a collaborative document in which they gathered and refined ideas about questions, issues and concerns they had about the way their education was structured. Once the survey was designed they collected and collated the data to arrive at some of the statistics you see presented in this video. Interestingly, the video itself was shot in a single 75 minute lesson. I found it quite compelling.  I was also struck by the quote from McLuhan talking about the “information scarce” mentality of the 19th century model of schooling… back in 1967!  That’s 40 years ago, and in many places nothing has really changed.

A second new video created by Wesch called Information (R)evolution is also floating around the net at the moment, and is also worth checking out.

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Mini Movies

I mentioned in a previous post that the average cell phone these days can do SO much more than most people ever discover. This revelation struck me when I saw someone demonstrating a video clip they made from footage taken on their phone’s camera. What this person didn’t realise was that some phones can not only shoot the footage, but can also edit it as well. I won’t repeat the list of stuff that can be done – you can go read the other post if you really want to know more – but I was surprised at just how simple it is to throw a short clip together.

To put the theory to the test, I went to watch my kids play tennis today and took some footage with my phone. (Well, mainly of my daughter… my son kept telling me to go away. Fathers can be so embarrasing!) I shot 6 or 7 clips, then used the phone’s editing software, called VideoDJ, to trim each one, add titles and transitions, place the clips in order, and render a final movie. I could have added music in the background too, but I thought was going overboard a little. Total time taken to edit from start to finish was about 6 minutes – in fact I did it while standing in a shop waiting for a hamburger to be made for my lunch!

Of course, the quality is a bit ordinary, as this particular phone only shoots at 176×144 pixels at 10 fps, but still… I uploaded the finished video to YouTube, not so much as a video masterpiece but more as a proof of concept. For what it’s worth, here it is…

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