Wednesday, February 06, 2013

Tools of Engagement Project


  I have been participating in professional development for faculty at the State University of NY at Buffalo through a site called Tools of Engagement. Although previous mods proved interesting, this morning I viewed the mod on collaborative spaces and was disappointed.   Although I was glad to see that my favorite site, Voice Thread, (VT) was featured, I was dissatisfied with the examples that were provided.
    Unfortunately some of the links for examples of VT did not work, but for those that did, the examples showed very little interaction between creator and audience.  The threads showed the creators using VT as a substitute for Power Point.  In my opinion the presenters were ignoring one of the main features of the program -comments.
    In my own online course I use a class Voice Thread for students to post their reflections on certain activities they have done or tools they have explored.  Here is an example from a previous course.  The students in that course (who were all present or future teachers) were also required to create their own Voice Thread to use with their own students.  Learning L2 Culture: More Than Words is an example created by one of the students in which he used VT to elicit comments about French culture.
   Personally I feel that I have just begun to utilize all the features of VT and hope to soon incorporate more.

1 comment:

RobinSullivan said...

Hi Maryanne, Thank you for providing feedback about the examples that were selected to demonstrate VoiceThread. The only way we will be able to make TOEP better is to get feedback on what we can do to improve it. I agree that the examples that were included were not the best demonstration of the collaborative use of VoiceThread. I looked around a bit further and updated the examples. If you have suggestions of other good examples on how to harness the features that make VoiceThread unique and beneficial for online discussions please share them.