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.

VoiceThread

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.

Upload files for your VoiceThread

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.

Fetch content via khan academy

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.

Add presentation title, description an playback options

The latter can be used to set a timer for slides, prevent comments from deletion, enable download for media files, etc.

Configure playback options for slides

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.

Add audio and video comments

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.

Call to record voice over

Sharing your VoiceThreads

You can share your presentation publicly or privately. The sharing options include various common sharing options like URL & embed code

Share presentation online

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

About Farshad

IT professional, communications specialist and Blogger!

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *