As part of Edutopia.org’s  Summer Professional Development Series, I was honored to be selected as the facilitator of  a workshop on web 2.0 tools for new teachers. Over the five-week workshop, participants learned about one new tool a week, by visiting my blog on Edutopia, did some practice lessons with the tool and then developed their own samples.

The samples of their work with the tool were then placed on a portfolio page on the New Teacher Boot Camp wiki .

Each week, we met on Twitter for #ntchat on Wednesdays at 8pm ET/5pm PT to discuss the tool and share our experiences and ideas.

As many of you may have missed this great opportunity, I’m going to continue sharing the posts that were on Edutopia here. This will be a great opportunity, as the school year gets started for many of you, to dive in to these tools once a week.

Here is week 2 in this 5 week series: Using Voicethread in the Classroom. Read below to get started…

Week 2: Using Voicethread in the Classroom

Welcome to our second week of New Teacher Boot Camp! Today we’re going to be exploring VoiceThread.

About VoiceThread

VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slide show that allows students to comment on images, documents, and video through text, video, and audio files. Teachers can set up groups and classes as well as moderate comments, embed to blogs, and export to audio files.  It is an easy way to differentiate instruction while providing engaging choices to “show” learning, engage in conversation, and think openly and critically about content.

Before we get started, please review this intro video, What’s a VoiceThread anyway?

Introducing Megan Palevich

Megan Palevich is curriculum specialist and 8th grade language arts teacher in Chester County, PA. She is also a wonderful resource for this week’s theme: VoiceThread. Here is a short interview I did with her about her approach to using VoiceThread in the classroom.

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Before reading on, please take a look at this example of a VoiceThread from Megan’s eighth grade class based on the novel The Red Kayak, by Priscilla Cummings.

You can navigate through the Voicethread by clicking the arrow on the bottom right.  Each time you go to a new “page” you will hear the prompt for that page first.

Megan Palevich, Curriculum Specialist and 8th Grade Language Arts, on Using VoiceThread

This year I used Voicethread as an alternative way to discuss literature.

Instead of a traditional read and respond or read and discuss, VoiceThread could offer my students the opportunity to listen and show through text, audio, or video. As you can see on my VoiceThread example, some students were comfortable jumping right into video while others were more comfortable with typing text.

What I found was that when given an alternative learning space, and choice in response, my students were dynamically engaged in discussing one of their summer reading novels! They loved creating their responses as well as listening to each other when we played the completed VoiceThread on our SmartBoard.

For the rest of the school year, they always asked if VoiceThread could be one of their options for responses. For this upcoming school year, I have created a poetry podcast site where my students will be creating their own VoiceThreads with original poems for their classmates to comment on. To me, the value of a Web 2.0 tool is in its ability to enhance the student’s learning experience, and allows teachers to be inspired to cultivate learning in a purposeful, dynamic way. I would urge all educators to take advantage of VoiceThread, an easy-to-use and flexible learning tool with their students.

Free VoiceThread Tutorials

• VoiceThread Tutorials: Comment Moderation
• VoiceThread Tutorial: Video Doodling

Thanks to Megan for these great VoiceThread ideas to jumpstart our work with this awesome tool!

Now…if you want to do the assignment we did in July you can follow the steps below to get started! 

Voicethread Resources for the Classroom

• 25 Interesting Ways to Use VoiceThread in the Classroom (a collaborative effort between Megan Palevich and @tombarrett)
• VoiceThread Ning Community
• An Educator’s Guide to VoiceThread
• Multimedia Literacy Group on Edutopia
• You can also use the “browse” feature on VoiceThread to see some really great examples of how people are using VoiceThread to have conversations.

About Megan Palevich

Megan Palevich is a curriculum specialist and 8th grade language arts teacher in Chester County, PA.  She has been teaching for 16 years and has her M.Ed. in Educational Leadership.  Megan blogs about technology integration in language arts at Middle School 101.  She is a life-long learner who believes in engaging her students through technology integration and passion-based learning.

I hope this will inspire you to get started with VoiceThread!

If, you are already a savvy VoiceThread user, pass this post along to a newbie who could use it! Let me know, if it’s helpful. Stay tuned for next Friday’s posting…

Thanks for stopping by and for joining the journey into this fall learning opportunity!