VoiceThread: Make Engaging Group Presentations With Voice Over
When it comes to group presentations, some students are shy, while others seem to have a say in everything. It can be hard to encourage students to use PowerPoint alone for participating in presentations effectively. Then there is the question about who in the group actually did some work while others just came to the show to pretend they did some of the needed hard work. VoiceThread is an excellent web application which makes online group presentations fun and easy for K-12 students.
Make K-12 Presentations More Intuitive & Engaging
With VoiceThread teachers can make K-12 presentations more intuitive and engaging by allowing students to add their voice over to slides. VoiceThread enables uploading files from various formats, which can be given a simple voice over by one or more students, with options which allow doodling over slides, working in collaboration on a single presentation online and various sharing options for private and public sharing for presentations.
Upload Files from Different File Formats
You can begin by uploading files, to create presentations or fetch content via URL, webcam (support for photos and videos) or media sources. The supported file types include everything from DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX, PDF, ODT, XLS, XLSX, ODS to image formats like JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, as well as audio and video file formats. The audio formats supported by VoiceThread include; MP3 and WAV, whereas the video formats includes formats like QuickTime, AVI and WMV.
You can rearrange the uploaded content in a sequence, as this sequence will become your slide sequence when the presentation is ready.
The Media Sources option provides a few useful sources from which you can fetch content, mostly of academic value. These include; Khan Academy, New York Public Library, Flickr and your VoiceThreads.
Add Presentation Title, Description & Configure Playback Options
When making your presentation you can give it a name, description and add tags. Other options enable adding CoverArt and setting Playback options.
The latter can be used to set a timer for slides, prevent comments from deletion, enable download for media files, etc.
Add Comments to Slides via Audio, Video, Text or Phone Call
VoiceThread enables group participation through one very useful mechanism, i.e. by enabling users to add comments. These comments can be added in the form of text, audio, video, file or via phone call.
Call your Number to Record a Voice-Over
The phone option allows users to call their phone to make an audio comment which is quite convenient for students who might not have smartphones or a mic. For example, a teacher might want to record comments on a slide from primary students using his/her phone. In such a case it is quite natural for young students to not own a phone. For now, VoiceThread only support numbers from United States.
Sharing your VoiceThreads
You can share your presentation publicly or privately. The sharing options include various common sharing options like URL & embed code
Introduction to VoiceThread
VoiceThread also has applications for iOS and Android which can help you create your voice based presentations using a smartphone or tablet. VoiceThread is a great platform not just for students and teachers but also for people looking to collaborate and communicate with clients and colleagues using ‘voice threads’ for shared slides.
Go to VoiceThread