"VoiceThread Extends the Classroom with Interactive Multimedia Albums"

I read the article "VoiceThread Extends the Classroom with Interactive Multimedia Albums," taken from Edutopia, to learn more about VoiceThread and how it can be further used in the classroom. The author, Laila Weir, focuses on Bill Ferriter, a sixth grade teacher in North Carolina, and his experiences using VoiceThead in his language arts and social studies classrooms.

Our students spend a lot of their free time online - from email to My Space to gaming. Bill Ferriter chose to tap into something that the students already like to do and began using VoiceThread as a way to "steal some of their online minutes" (Weir, 2008). He began by posting VoiceThreads and having his students comment on them. They were not required to comment; commenting was entirely voluntary. Ferriter noticed that on some of the slides he would have dozens of comments, and he would have hundreds on others. These comments created a dialogue between his students that branched into moral and ethical conversations surrounding these issues.

One thing that Ferriter noticed was that the students from class who are generally timid really shed their shells on VoiceThread. They were able to really think about their comments and have a chance to express them without being overshadowed by those students who always speak out in class. Another benefit to the VoiceThread conversations that Ferriter experienced is that "multiple conversations [can be] going on at once" (Weir, 2008). Whereas the classroom conversation is directed by the teacher and linear, the conversations online can be free to take off into many different directions, as the students decide what they'd like to say. In addition, he brings up a comment in class each day, and he and the students evaluate what "makes for a good or bad comment" (Weir, 2008).

The VoiceThreads that Ferriter uses not only reinforce classroom topics, they also reinforce writing skills as the students are given a chance to free-write their thoughts on these topics. As Ferriter states, asking students to get out paper and pencil and write can really isolate students, but having them express their thoughts in a dialogue engages many more students in excellent conversation.

Weir, L. (2008). VoiceThread extends the classroom with interactive multimedia albums. Edutopia. Retrieved from http://www.edutopia.org/voicethread-interactive-multimedia-albums on September 21, 2009.