In this podcast we continue to track some of the developments at VoiceThread with co-founders, Steve Muth and Ben Papell. We also talk with:

• Gail Desler, Tech Liaision with the Area 3 Wrting Project in Northern California
• Lee Kolbert, a recently-returned to the clssroom teacher in Boca Raton, Florida.

Lee joined us fresh from her presenting at Alan November's Building Learning Communities conference in Boston. One of her presentations was about VoiceThread. Gail reports on a VoiceThread project that she had done with 4th Grade teacher, Halerin Ferrier, "Letters from the Internment Camps."

Steve and Ben tell us why they have set up this VoiceThread Digital Library, and they describe another inspiring example that can be found there, K-12 art, poetry, and music from Erin Berg:

This is a collaborative VT from three different classes across the United States (2nd graders from Utah, 9th grade English students from Colorado, and 5th-6th grade music composition students from Texas). This VT is an example of the power of collaboration using technology. This encompasses art through words, visuals, and music.

Second graders first completed a piece of artwork, depicting a place they love to visit or imagine visiting. Then, 9th graders used a Wiki to divide up the artwork. They worked on their poetry and attached it as a comment on the VT. Then, the link was sent to a classroom in Texas, where boys worked to compose an original piece of music for each picture using GarageBand. Overall, it took about 2 1/2 months to put together.

And if that's not enough Ben and Steve use this webcast to unofficially announce (It's official now.) a partnership with the New York Public Library. Joyce Valenza does a great job of describing some of these new VoiceThread connections in her post: "Voicethread gets even cooler! NYPL, Creative Commons, and more."

After all of that, we hope you still have time to listen to the podcast!

Click Read more to see a transcript of a chat that was happening during the webcast.

For this podcast, we invited five New York City educators who, at the time, were in the middle of a 3-week Summer Institute with the New York City Writing Project. Paul Allison and Shantanu Saha were the facilitators for this Institute in which participants were invited to:

Spend 12 days this summer with other New York City Writing Project teachers who use technology in their classrooms. Share the ways we use the Internet to make student-to-student connections. Learn about a curriculum currently being developed and collaborated on by teachers across the nation. Explore how we use blogs, wikis, images, videos, podcasts, and other tools to inspire young people to do research into their own questions.

These are five of the teachers who joined us:

• Charlie Freij, Technology/English Teacher, East Brooklyn Community High School
• Doug Condon, Art Teacher, Academy of American Studies in Queens
• Julio Benitez, English Teacher, High School for Construction Trades, Engineering, and Architecture, Queens
• Karen Levy, Library Media Specialist, Christopher Columbus High School, Bronx
• Michael Dodes, Library Media Specialist, samuel Gompers Career/Technonogy Ed High School, Bronx

We also had a wonderful surprise guest, Suzie Boss. Just before going live with this webcast (that is recorded here as a podcast), Paul noticed that Suzie Boss was online in Skype. Since we had been talking about her book earlier in the day, Paul took a chance and invited Suzie to join them. What an thoughful, supportive, informed guest she was!

And that's not all. We were also joined by Mike from Central Texas. He's been teaching for 40 years, using inquiry, Great Books Discussions, and the New Jersey Writing Project (in Texas) as his touchstones, and recently he has been exploring Web 2.0 tools. This was his first skype call.

How wonderful it was to add these names to our list of guests:

• Suzie Boss, co-author (with Jane Krauss) of Reinventing Project-Based Learning: Your Field Guide to Real-World Projects in the Digital Age
• Mike, a 40-year veteran history teacher from Central Texas

Please enjoy the podcast. Find out what happens in a tech-focused Advanced/Open Summer Institute in the New York City Writing Project.

Click Read more to see a transcript of a chat that was happening during the webcast.

Susan Ettenheim just started using Sproutbuilder this spring and is always happy to work with VoiceThread, an all time favorite application, so we decided to introduce them to each other with you joining us in the conversation. Trudy Marquardt from Sproutbuilder joined us with Justin Ellsworth, a Sprout using educator, and Ben Papell and Steve Muth from VoiceThread.

From VoiceThread: With VoiceThread, group conversations are collected and shared in one place from anywhere in the world. All with no software to install. A VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images, documents, and videos and allows people to navigate pages and leave comments in 5 ways - using voice (with a mic or telephone), text, audio file, or video (via a webcam). Share a VoiceThread with friends, students, and colleagues for them to record comments too. Users can doodle while commenting, use multiple identities, and pick which comments are shown through moderation. VoiceThreads can even be embedded to show and receive comments on other websites and exported to MP3 players or DVDs to play as archival movies.

Steve and Ben, aside from sharing with Trudy and Justin and our listeners, introduced the amazing new VoiceThread Library. The Digital Library is a database of articles about successful VoiceThread projects. It creates a resource that offers guidance and inspiration for people undertaking new projects.

Sprout Builder is a web-hosted, visual authoring solution that allows creative professionals to quickly and easily create branded, rich-media content and widgets. So, why are we interested in it for education? Our students want to build, build, build - who wouldn't want to "make a website" and publish it?

When Harold Rheingold posted  a tweet about SproutBuilder, Susan was intrigued, having followed his work for many years since his very first books about online community.
http://socialmediaclassroom.com/digitaljournalism09/wiki/widgets-lab
http://socialmediaclassroom.com/digitaljournalism09/wiki/a-short-guide-how-i-created-demo-sprout-less-hour

Susan's students had been asking to build websites and since becoming a Google Apps school, students had access to Sites. Could they start a Site that could grow to be a digital portfolio over the four years of high school? Could Sites be interesting enough to them to hold their attention? They started a main page and then were frozen. What could they talk about? They were "only" in 9th grade. They needed to gain some confidence and validate the interests and passions that they did already have. Every student found a topic about which they wanted to learn more and built a Sprout to explore the topic. Along the way, they learned about fair use, developing a point of view and a hook into a story, citations and rss feeds. They started to learn about widgets and social media and saw how a giant like Pepsi, http://www.pepsithrowbackhub.com/index.html and a 9th grade student could explore using the same tool.

Trudy Marquardt at SproutBuilder started answering Susan's help questions and introduced her to Justin who has started an amazing wiki about SproutBuilder.
Here are some links that Justin shared:
http://www.farmington.k12.mi.us/
http://www.farmington.k12.mi.us/woo/classrooms/2nd/index.php
http://singtokids.wikispaces.com/Fifth+Grade

Here are some links to get you started:
http://www.sproutbuilder.com/
http://ed.voicethread.com
http://techfarm.wikispaces.com/Sprout

Here is a link to a YouTube Video that Trudy made on Sprouts and Education:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mok49o2o2e4

oh and... the link to the VoiceThread Moodle embed plugin - http://voicethread.com/blog/

Thank you Harold Rheingold for your Twitter posts! One of Harold's college students has even corresponded with one of Susan's students about building Sprouts.

Where are the intersection between widgets, commercialism, education and those amazing creations like Voice Thread and Sprout who seem to knit it all together? Please add your thoughts and experiences to our discussion. Keep it real!

Click Read more to see a transcript of a chat that was happening during the webcast.

Do you use VoiceThread? Many of us do, and as we grow with this application in our classrooms, it’s great to know that the founders are still there with us, listening and improving their tool.

Perhaps you also received an email from the VoiceThread team earlier this month. Upon their release of “a major update to our Groups feature and want to share how it works and what it means for everyday VoiceThreaders.” They go on to explain that the improvements mean that groups are “persistent,” “borderless,” and “simple.” And they did profide “a Thread showing what’s new and how to use it.” http://voicethread.com/share/343705/.

Fair enough, but this made Susan Ettenheim and Paul Allison feel the need for more conversation! We asked Steve Muth and Ben Papell to join us on Teachers Teaching Teachers February 25.

We also invited four teachers whose art as educators includes using VoiceThread. Bill Ferriter, Mattie Ettenheim, Mary Ellen Rudolph, Colette Cassinelli and others!

Enjoy the podcast.

Click Read more to see a transcript of a chat that was happening during the webcast.

Another in our series of virtual staff lounges here at EdTechTalk. This week I'm joined by Jennifer Wagner, Brad Hicks and James Sigler for a discussion about web-based projects and how technology is and can be used in the classroom and for professional development.

Chat Transcript: