This July, Paul Allison and Julie Conason fascilated a 3-week Writing Project Institute for teachers where we used VoiceThread as the focus of one of our weeks together. In the middle of our work with teachers, we invited Steve Muth, co-founder of VoiceThread, and Colette Cassinelli, a technology teacher near Portland, Oregon who started a wiki that collects examples of VoiceThreads.

What will you find on Collette's VoiceThread4Education?

• Samples submitted by teachers of VoiceThread projects made by their students
• VoiceThreads used in professional development
• Resources, including other websites that contain VoiceThread examples
• Best Practices - tips and ideas of how to best implement VoiceThread in your curriculum
• Subject area ideas

"This is your wiki," Colette writes: "Please feel free to add any ideas, examples or resources to the site and provide appropriate link attribution. If you are not sure how to embed your VoiceThread projects in wikispaces - follow the directions below."

In addition: Paul and Julie invite you to take a look at the "Narrative Discussions" from our Institute, linked below. We would love your comments on these.

Some educators, including some of us who meet regularly on Teachers Teaching Teachers, have begun to find places in our curriculum for microblogging.

“Compared to regular blogging, microblogging fulfills a need for an even faster mode of communication. By encouraging shorter posts, it lowers users’ requirement of time and thought investment for content generation. This is also one of its main differentiating factors from blogging in general. The second important difference is the frequency of update. On average, a prolific blogger may update her blog once every few days; on the other hand a microblogger may post several updates in a single day.” (Java Akshay, Tim Finin, Xaiodan Song, Bell Tseng, Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communitites. August 12, 2007)

Ellen Petry Leanse has a powerful story to tell of her escape from the political unrest in Kenya during the presidential elections over the 2007 Christmas holidays. She and her 12 year old son were there volunteering in an orphanage as well as other humanitarian work. I first encountered her story January 15th on Guy Kawasaki’s blog as a guest post. Her writing moved me. Something inside of me kept saying to contact her and help her share what she and her son went through. As Google would have it, her email came up in the first try, and by 8:11 AM I sent off a personal plea to her to share her narrative through digital storytelling.

A Piece of My Mind - my ideas, thoughts, experiences, and lessons learned in education The founders of VoiceThread, Ben Papell and Steve Muth, also join us in this discussion of the lessons that can be learned from this one example of digital storytelling.

Ben Papell and Steve Muth are fed up with the number of school districts across the US that are bocking VoiceThread. Even though VoiceThread was one of the most popular Web-tools with educators in 2007, it has also been unavailable to many teachers because of district or school filters that block all free websites or sites that allow for user contributions or that allow students to surf to unapproved content... or for whatever reasons. All Ben and Steve know is that they've been getting a steady stream of emails that say something like: "I love, love, love VoiceThread! I use it at home, but I can't use it in my school. It's blocked! Is there any way you can help?"

Ben and Steve are not the first developers of tools like VoiceThread to run into problems like this. They may be the first to come up with a solution that not only solves the blocking problem, but potentially makes their product even more attractive because it will give students of all ages free (to them), unlimited access to their own VoiceThread accounts that teachers can manage without using email addresses. Here are some of the details that Ben and Steve provided:

The Ed.VoiceThread network is a worldwide community where safety is built upon a foundation of accountability. All users are known users, responsible for their content and behavior. Access is restricted to K-12 educators, students and administrators, and all content is created exclusively by registered members of the community. Web services offering free accounts are blocked in many school districts because of child online protection policies, and are not eligible for federal eRate monies. For this reason, there are no free Ed.VoiceThread accounts and student email addresses are not required. Educators must pay a one time $10 verification fee to become a member of the community, with no recurring costs.

Schools will also be able to pay a monthly fee (about $100), which will make it possible for all teachers in the building to use VoiceThread with their students.

Learn more about this innovative plan on this webcast. Ben Papell and Steve Muth joined us once again to explain changes they are making to address access problems in US schools.

Ed.VoiceThread goes live on Thursday, January 17. Get the inside story on this podcast.

Chat Log

We were joined this week by Joyce Valenza and the co-founders of of Voice Thread, Ben Papell and Steve Muth (and many wonderful teachers in the chat room). In the spirit of producing content that is open to co-creation...

...we invite you add an interesting Voice Thread to this post. Either link to or embed a Voice Thread that would help show how teachers are using this tool in their classrooms or with their colleagues.

Click Add new comment, and show us a Voice Thread that you think is cool!

Thanks.

Chat Log