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Extend Conversations Beyond Class

Sometimes when students are working on group assignments such as presentations, debates, or case studies, you may notice that not everyone is participating. Some students are very enthusiastic, while others sit back in their chairs and let their peers do the work. How can you ensure that the work is evenly distributed and that all your students are engaged?

Perhaps your students are engaged in a discussion that is going spectacularly well, and is cut short because the class session ends. Wouldn't it be great to have a way to extend that conversation outside of class?

VoiceThread might provide a solution to these problems. In VoiceThread every student has a voice, and each student can choose from a range of tools to communicate. Students can login to the course on Blackboard and participate in the discussion, at a time that fits their busy school and work schedules.

What is VoiceThread?

VoiceThread is an asynchronous web-based interactive tool for collaboration and sharing. A VoiceThread can contain images, videos, and documents, with or without narration. Viewers can add comments using voice, text, audio file, or video.

What does it look like? See these two examples by Michelle Pacansky-Brock.

Educational technologies vary in their functionally and features. When you choose an educational technology to use in your class, consider the needs of the 21st-century students, their interests and learning styles. Millenials want to be active participants and content creators rather than passive content recipients.

VoiceThread has three distinctive criteria: it allows students to be active and engaged, collaborate and co-create, and express themselves by various means of communication.

Engagement: VoiceThread allows students to engage with the content of the course, an instructor and peers by actively contributing to the discussion on and about an artifact, a mini-lecture or a presentation. Students can also create a VoiceThread and become creators and critics of other VoiceThreads.

Collaboration: Students can collaborate with their peers and work in groups creating a VoiceThread (e.g. a presentation or a demonstration). Students can create and edit a VoiceThread in a group and share it with the rest of the class, who can also contribute and comment of their work.

Functionality: VoiceThread is one-of-a-kind technology that supports a discussion that is not primarily text-based. If you are already using a Discussion Board in Blackboard, then you are familiar with text-based discussions. VoiceThread lets you take the conversation outside of the text-based environment and allows your students to be creative. Your students can use over 50 different types of media in a VoiceThread as the basis for a conversation.

Last year, the Educational Technology Committee of the Academic Senate developed a guide for selecting and evaluating emerging technologies. We used this guide to evaluate VoiceThread – refer to it if you would like a more comprehensive overview of the tool.

Resources:

Contributor:
Olena Zhadko, PhD
Manager, Course Development
Center for Teaching and Learning
New York Institute of Technology
ozhadko@nyit.edu