Penn State University & VoiceThread
Penn State University (PSU) has integrated a customized version of VoiceThread's communication platform in an effort to provide a seamless collaborative environment for its staff and students. PSU user accounts are automatically authenticated into the platform, providing instant access to VoiceThread.
The integration was developed in close partnership with PSU's Educational Technology Services group, whose white paper and support portal provide remarkably clear and helpful guidance for new student and faculty users.
- White paper: 7 Things You Need to Know about VoiceThread
- Support portal: http://voicethread.psu.edu/
We would like to sincerely thank PSU's ETS group for their hard work and high standards, which will ensure an excellent experience for their community of users.
posted on December 18th, 2010 by Steve
Upload improvements - complex PDFs
We have made recently made some improvements to our upload process, to accommodate PDF uploads with more than 65,536 individual shapes in a single PDF. This is primarily caused by how PowerPoint renders high complexity backgrounds (i.e. complex patterns instead of a simple color or a bitmap / picture). We still recommend simple backgrounds for the best user experience, especially since extremely complex PDFs can still take 20-30 seconds per page to process.
posted on December 3rd, 2010 by Simon
We have a new twitter feed, twitter.com/voicethreadIT. This is solely for system status information, and we will use this to announce any maintenance or issues that result in user-visible slowdowns or downtime. As always, we have highly redundant infrastructure and strive for zero downtime, but there are occasionally changes needed for long-term stability, performance and growth that result in brief outages or slowdowns.
posted on November 8th, 2010 by Simon
All of the documentation for our Moodle LMS integration modules is now online. Please go to the LMS Integration About page for more information. Take a look at the embedding, assignment and authentication modules, and see what they can do for your organization!
Please note that we only support Moodle 1.9.x at this time; we do plan to port to Moodle 2.0 once it has been released.
posted on October 13th, 2010 by Simon
Edutopia Back-to-School Guide, Digital Library additions
VoiceThread is proud to be featured in Edutopia's "Back-to-School Guide: Jump Start Learning With New Media" for the 2010-2011 school year (download it here). This is a fantastic guide to learn how to incorporate new media tools into your teaching.
Some wonderful articles have recently been added to the VoiceThread Digital Library that highlight VoiceThread's effectiveness in various teaching and learning settings. The library is a great resource for educators using VoiceThread. It provides the opportunity to get ideas, share successful VoiceThread projects, and get the most out of VoiceThread as a learning tool!
VoiceThread continues to be used in ways that both impress and inspire us here on the VoiceThread team. We want to thank everyone who has contributed to VoiceThread's Digital Library and urge anyone else who has a VoiceThread they'd like to contribute, to please do so.
Here are a few of the new articles to the Digital Library:
- Using VoiceThread in an online course from Professor Russ Meade
- Language learners use VoiceThread to practice speaking
- 10th grade Chinese language practice from Lilia Hurteau
- 7th graders practice Math in Action from Ms Redd
- 4th graders study plants in collaboration with Pakistani students
posted on September 28th, 2010 by Andrew
VoiceThread is now a member of the InCommon Federation. This greatly simplifies Shibboleth authentication integration with colleges and universities already members of InCommon, which includes the majority of Research-I Universities in the United States. This should allow for faster deployments for Shibboleth authentication, with much less work on the University / Identity Provider's end. Thanks to Penn State University for sponsoring our InCommon application.
posted on September 13th, 2010 by Simon
Moodle "Create a Thread" Assignment Module Beta
We are pleased to announce that we are now in open beta with our first Moodle assignment module. This module provides a clean, easy to use student and teacher interfaces for submitting, viewing and grading a VoiceThread. The module is compatible with Moodle 1.9.x and requires either our Embedding or Authentication Moodle modules for configuration support. For the duration of the beta, we only support one Moodle instance with one VoiceThread Manager account.
This module only works with accounts that have VoiceThread Manager (Business Manager, Higher Ed Manager, College, School, District, etc); also, the VoiceThread account must match the scope of the Moodle instance. For example, a departmental subscription cannot use this module with a University-wide Moodle instance. If you would like to join our beta program, please contact us.
posted on August 6th, 2010 by Simon
For larger accounts (districts, universities, etc), VoiceThread can integrate with your own authentication or Single Sign On (SSO) system, including using Moodle as a Single Sign On provider. We support Microsoft's Active Directory, most LDAP implementations, and several standard SSO products, as well as Moodle 1.9.x with our VoiceThread SSO block. Whether or not VoiceThread uses your authentication, all user content is still stored on our servers, and all user interaction (other than login, if using SSO) is still with our servers.
To help ensure the security of your users' data, we do have some specific requirements for LDAP, AD or SSO integration. If you would like to discuss authentication integration for your organization, please contact us!
posted on August 5th, 2010 by Simon
The VoiceThread Accelerator is a high performance content distribution and caching appliance that can provide a tremendous improvement in VoiceThread performance for certain network configurations. In particular, if you have excellent connectivity within your organization, but limited downstream bandwidth from the Internet at large, the Accelerator might be a good fit for your organization. Pricing depends on the number of bundled accounts; please contact us for more information.
posted on May 25th, 2010 by Simon
We have upgraded some of the software involved in Office type document conversion. You should see smoother imports of Office 2007 format files in particular. Note that this only affects freshly uploaded files; if your PowerPoint slides weren't perfectly pointy, you will need to re-upload them. As always, we recommend you keep Office documents simple for the best VoiceThread experience.
posted on March 29th, 2010 by David
New Comment Email Notifications
You spoke, and we listened. One of our most requested features was the desire to be notified when comments are left on one of your VoiceThreads, without having to actually check VoiceThread (we all already have enough things to check).
One thing people do check regularly is email. So, we decided to create an email notification system that sends a "Daily Digest" version of all of the comments on your VoiceThreads, from the last day. With a quick visit to your My Account page, you'll see a new menu item called, Notifications. From here you can quickly turn off and on these daily new comment email notifications.
We are planning to do more with notifications - perhaps more control on when you are notified, perhaps notified in ways other than email. This feature was largely driven by the excellent feedback we've received, so please continue to speak to us.
posted on March 24th, 2010 by Andrew
As many of you are aware, we have a Moodle embedding module. We're now looking to kick our Moodle integration up a notch, and need your feedback! What are the top three things you would like VoiceThread and Moodle to be able to do together? We're already looking at ideas from assignment modules to single sign-on, and need your feedback! Please send us your thoughts.
posted on March 19th, 2010 by Simon
