It dawned on us pretty early that not only was the VoiceThread platform perfect for distance learning because of the way it made asynchronous feel synchronous via capturing and conveying the complexities of the human voice. We also realized that tech educators were the one group of people who 'got it', almost immediately. While everyone else was confusing us for a narrated slide-show, it was the intrepid web exploring educators who saw the possibilities and started to build the first exploratory courseware that our team had only brainstormed about. We just wanted to express the gratitude we feel to this community for picking up the tool and taking it where we as non educators could not. The VoiceThread U. section of our forum is really dedicated to this community. As non-educators we are strictly in listening mode right now, we want to know anything and everything that we can do to improve the platform. So please let us know via the feedback link what features and tweaks you'd like to see. But when it comes to teaching itself, we're going to take a step back and let the experts discuss and educate each other. So please use this forum as a place to ask any questions regarding the issues specific to classroom use of VoiceThread. If the issues are technical in nature we'll jump in and try and help out, but if they concern teaching modalities we're going to let the community do what it does so well already, support, teach, and collaborate, with each other.

Thanks again,

The VoiceThread Team

p.s. Here's a link to a written step-by-step instructional on getting started VoiceThread in the classroom Feel free to share it.

Hi Barry,

Here are links to a few that showcase some of the possibilities.

Living or Non-Living
Surrealists-Contoversial Art
MathCast's 7 NS 2.3

We're hoping that as the people become more familiar with the tool, they'll create 'types' of instructional Threads which will serve particular needs. Over time we'd like to develop a framework of best practices and collate them into documents and tutorials. For now, we're in learning mode.

Thanks,

-Steve

We love Classroom 2.0 at Ning! We'd really love to emulate the community feel there. As far as editing a Thread after you've made it the answer is yes, absolutely, and forever. VoiceThreads presentations are 'broadcast' to all the people who view them, so if you make a change on your Thread, the change is experienced by all the people who view it from then on. You can edit all the Threads you make by going to your 'MyVoice' page, clicking on the gear icon in the thumbnail of your Thread, then click 'Edit' Here's a link to a very basic tutorial of the new site's creative process.

1 Minute Tutorial on Creating a Thread with the new VoiceThread

Also, here's a tutorial on comment moderation, which you'll almost always want to turn on in the classroom setting. Tutorial on Comment Moderation

Later this week we'll add another one that covers some of the more advanced features. You're so right, intuitive is great, but a wee bit of textual explanation can go a long way;)

Hi Gary, sorry for taking so long to get back to you. You did a really good job already of exploring the options. The first big questions to answer are 'How old are you students? how many do you have? and what's your comfort level with them? The 'identities' system was really designed for K-7(really K-4) where it's critical that a teacher have total visibility and oversight over their students work and interactions on a Thread. But allowing your students to actually create/change settings/and share their work while using an 'identity' on the teachers account is not such a good idea after a certain age.

I think you figured out a good solution when you said "I should create an empty shell thread for each group invite group members in each individual project. Have the group members upload a number of files less than 50 then allow them to comment and create their story." This is the best solution because if you are the original creator of the Thread, then only you can delete it, which could save some occasional heartache. If you then invite the students(they each have their own account) and then make the students co-editors then they'll be able to work independently of you but you'll see all of their work and can keep an eye on it.

As far as the upload limit, yes if the students have a free account they won't be able to upload a 51st page to the Thread, even though you(the Educator account) created the Thread.

Hope that helps, let me know if something wasn't clear,

Thanks,

-Steve

Hi Ruthmary,

160 students! wow, you're not kidding. Yes, you can't be the one creating all of the Threads. With that many students they need to all get their own accounts, make their own Threads and then invite you to them to see their work. You can check the fee account limits (three VoiceThreads at any one time and 75mb of content) but we tried to make sure that our base level free account was really and actually very usable. I would suggest making the VoiceThread projects really short anyway, our statistics show that if a VoiceThread gets longer than 15 pages the number of viewers who look at every page drops precipitously, so short and well designed is the way to go. If the free account limits are really impinging on your students creativity then ask your technology administrator to contact us about getting a site license where anybody and everybody at the school can have a 'Pro' account. I know it's not easy to push for something but if it works, it's about 1/10th the price per user.

Thanks, and definitely let us know what we can do.

-Steve

Hello everybody,

We've received a lot of question about how to handle accounts and students in a difficult age group, 8-12, so I thought I'd try to answer some of them here.

1. Do your students need to have actual, working email addresses to register? Right now, you do need a valid e-mail to register for your own account, but the question of whether students should use VoiceThread via their own account, or work under the teachers account is age dependent. Technically and all important legally speaking, students need to be 13 before they can have their own account. We realize that there is a difficult period between 8-12 where students are actually independent enough to create and manage their own account, and yet competent enough to cause a good bit of grief for a teacher;) So we're working on some solutions for the conundrum this age group presents. We're hoping to have some features to address this particular age group in time for next semester.

2. What is the best way to create a Thread for the kids to comment on, but meet your responsibility to keep the "bad stuff" out of the page?

The best way to create safe environments for the students to participate in is to create the Threads yourself using your Educator account, and make sure to turn http://voicethread.com/share/718/">comment moderation on. http://voicethread.com/share/718/">Comment moderation is the key, as long as it's turned on, only the creator, it's identities, and any other co-editors will see comments as soon as they are made. You must manually approve each and every comment for public visibility. This is usually sufficient to discourage any bad stuff from becoming visible to the students.
*on a side note, I know it's early but so far our ratio of inappropriate content is very, very low, out of 18,000 VoiceThreads, we've had to remove 5 so far for containing inappropriate content. We're developing some methods to detect and deal with this content very quickly, but we're hoping this ratio continues.

1. When a Thread is created, how quickly will it show up in the public Collection?

When you make a Thread public it will show up in our Browse section immediately. All Threads start out as private as a piece of paper on your desk, you have to choose to make them public, and when you do make them public you can choose to have them unlisted which means that although viewable by anyone who has the link to it, it will not be publicly visible in our Browse section. But the moment that someone makes a VoiceThread public it becomes visible(at the end of the directory) We specifically put newly public Threads at the end of the Collection rather than the beginning so that new users don't see the 'newest' until they've gone through the whole collection. This substantially decreases the payoff to would be 'bad-content' producers as their content will initially be seen by very few people(most likely us.)

1. Can a single account have multiple logins?
   Yes. If students are working under a teachers account, you can have as many students as you want simultaneously working on different computers.

Please let me know what you think about these as well as ask some more questions, we'd like to develop a core FAQ for educators.

Thanks,

-Steve

Hi Trudy,

The key to creating a Question and Answer Thread like http://voicethread.com/share/636/">Dr Quinn’s Love Line is Comment moderation. Basically you turn on comment moderation, which allows you to collect all the comments you want, but you the editor/creator are the only person who can see each and every comment. Smply select one of the hidden comments, make it visible to the public, then answer it yourself, and then repeat as needed.

*The creator sees all the comments in the chronological order they were made, but the public sees comments in the chronological order they were made public by the editor/creator.

This can seem a little confusing sometimes to the creator because they see all the comments, but if you log out and view the Thread as the public sees it, you'll see the difference. It seems strange at first, but once you get the hang of it it's really easy and it allows you to carefully craft and control the content. Dr. Quinn's love advice has over a hundred comments, but only about 20 were chosen by the Dr. for an answer;)

Here's a link to the http://voicethread.com/share/718/">comment moderation tutorial which shows you what it looks like.

Thanks,

-Steve