What is Ed.VoiceThread?

It's a web-based communications network for K-12 students and educators. Simple, powerful and safe, Ed.VoiceThread is a place for creating and collaborating on digital stories and documentaries, practicing and documenting language skills, exploring geography and culture, solving math problems, or simply finding and honing student voices.

• An accountable environment where all users users on the network are known users, responsible for their content and behavior.
• Restricted to K-12 educators, students and administrators, all content is created or vetted by registered members of the community.
• There are no free Ed.VoiceThread accounts, students may only participate in the community after being added by their teacher or school, and student email addresses are not required.

Student and Educator Participation

Students participate in the system only after being added by an Ed.VoiceThead educator or administrator. Perhaps the greatest advantage of using the Ed.VoiceThread network is that students can work on their own, creating their own VoiceThreads, maintaining their own portfolios of content.

Private, or Public

All VoiceThreads are private by default and creators can easily control who can view, edit and comment on content. Within this private state educators can collaborate with students, students with each other, and entire classes with other classes around the world. It's never necessary to make a VoiceThread publicly viewable, but we do believe students grow when they share and collaborate with others. The act of publishing content, that can be seen by anyone anywhere, reinforces the message that student work is unique, valuable, and worthy of the world's attention.

Class and School Subscriptions

A subscription allows an educator or administrator to give every one of their students their very own account. So that for less than the price of a single day's field trip, the students can spend an entire year collaborating with other students anywhere in the world, creating digital stories and documentary, finding and honing their own voices, creating their very own portfolio of work to document their growth. Use the following links to create class subscription, a school subscription.

How students are added, and what information is shown

Students are added via the online Administration Tool, one-by-one or by importing contact files. For each student, a first and last name is collected, along with any teacher, school and district information. Student email accounts are not required for them to participate. By default, a student identity/avatar only shows the pupil's first name. All other information is available only to the class/school/district administrator. Educators are free to override this restriction if parental permission is received.

Technical infrastructure

The only requirement for Ed.VoiceThread is a web-browser equipped with Adobe Flash 7+, presently installed in 99% of personal computers and a broadband connection. This network model of "software as a service," or SAAS, has a number of advantages for K-12 teachers, administrators and technologists. Most importantly, there is no software to download, install, manage or upgrade, and all data is redundantly backed up by the VoiceThread infrastructure. In short, the headaches are ours, not yours.

You will need to unblock the following urls:

• ed.voicethread.com (for the main Ed.VoiceThread site)
• *.ed.voicethread.com (for your school or classroom sites)
• cdn.voicethread.com (for browsing content)
• media.voicethread.com (for recording audio and video)

You can block voicethread.com to prevent students from seeing content not in the Ed.VoiceThread network.

Ed.VoiceThread FAQ

If my school or class joins the Ed.VoiceThread network, can we collaborate with people outside of the network?

Students on Ed.VoiceThread cannot invite participation from people who are not part of the Ed.VoiceThread network, but Educators can. Educators must simply use Comment Moderation (on by default) so that any commentary and content that comes from outside the network is vetted by them as appropriate for K-12 students. The key to safety on Ed.VoiceThread is not restraints on collaboration, but accountability. So, it's important to realize that joining Ed.VoiceThread does not put you or your class on an island, educators can invite participation and collaborate with anyone in the world.

What happens at the end of the year to the student's work?

As long as a school or class remains a subscriber to the network we continue to store student work indefinitely. This is critical to the goal of building year-over-year student portfolios. If a school or class subscription is ended we'll give every user a 60-day period so that they can export whatever content they want to take with them.

I already have a free Educator account on VoiceThread, what happens to it?

Nothing. When you join Ed.VoiceThread we simply verify your current account, which allows you to create classes and add students. You will use the same login and password, and all the content you've used is unchanged, you just start by signing in to http://ed.voicethread.com/.

Is the school subscription available to home school networks and other educational groups?

Yes, the only requirement is that the members of these groups be educators and students in K-12 learning environments.

How do I add students to my school or class subscription if they already have a free account on VoiceThread?

If a student or educator already has a VoiceThread account you can add them by entering their email address into the email field on the Administration Tool. We will not send them an email, but the next time they log in, they will be prompted to join the school or class group, if they accept, we will migrate their account over to Ed.VoiceThread.