The power of Voice in online classrooms

Consider this scenario.

You are an art history teacher and you are assigned with teaching a distance course. In the classroom, you have had great success with a teaching approach that involves showing photos on the big screen and building teaching moments by discussing with students the important elements of the image. You want to translate this teaching method to the distance realm. Of course, you have several challenges:

1. The students are geographically distributed and, therefore, using an audio-enabled online synchronous presentation room (such as Elluminate Live!) would be difficult for scheduling reasons.


2. You could write down an accompanying piece of text to go with an image where you describe the concepts and then you can ask students to engage in a text-based discussion around the concepts. But somehow the mechanics of this activity sound so ‘artificial’. It lacks that intangible quality of a face-to-face discussion while being able to point to parts of the image. It’s a poor substitute for what you have become accustomed to in the classroom: exchanging ideas both student-to-instructor and student-to-student while talking together, etc.


3. Your department has given a very small budget to help with the creation of your course – $100.

Does this sound like a daunting scenario?

Welcome to Voicethread. It’s a tool for having conversations around media. It’s a way to share with a group of people one or more images placed into a VoiceBook. Together you can make a series of audio comments on the images that everyone can hear and playback more than once. These voice comments can also be augmented with annotations to the images that highlight areas of interest – much like pointing to a section of a slide while talking in class. The power of this service becomes fantastic when you realize that students *and* instructors can both leave audio comments on the same image. So assembling together the audio commentary from a group of students is a great thing to experience. You can definitely feel the collective energy of the class much more intensely than you can with a written discussion forum. It gets much closer to providing that intangible feeling of face-to-face discussion while being completely asynchronous. For about $100 you can use it with a class of 50 students and it's entirely online with no software to install.

Do you want to see it in action? Michelle Pacansky-Brock, an Educational Consultant, has put together a few demonstration images into a Voicebook so you can experience the power of this tool.

If you want more info on Voicethread be sure to watch the intro video from the makers of Voicethread themselves. Also, visit (and contribute to) the Voicethread page on the classroom 2.0 wiki for additional resource related to Voicethread.

Do you have any exeprience with Voicethread or do you see an application for it in your field? Share your ideas with everyone by leaving a comment below.

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Eureka! Jott is here!

Have you ever had that ‘eureka’ moment when you’ve stumbled upon a piece of technology that is so interesting and useful to you that you can’t believe it’s real or free? I experienced this feeling today when I tried Jott. I first learned about it this morning as I managed to catch a few minutes of a presentation by Michael Wesch entitled ‘A Portal to the Future of Education” where he showcased several Web 2.0 applications that together can serve as tools for education today and into tomorrow.

In a nutshell, what Jott does in allow you to call a phone number and leave a voicemail message and then Jott transcribes the voicemail message into a text message that can be sent to a recipient’s email address. Very nice! Let me give you some good scenarios for its use.

[Update on Jott - 08 January 2009. Six months after this original blog posting - I have learned about changes in the Jott plans. The Free plan only allows you to jott yourself. The scenarios below were originally written when the Free plan allowed you to Jott anyone. Keep that in mind when reading the rest of this blog post.]

Scenario #1: My wife is a clinical social worker. I can’t call her during the day to communicate a message because she’s usually in a counseling session with a client. So I usually pass a message to her by email which she receives between clients or at the end of her workday. With Jott, I can now do this on the road with my cell phone! I can leave a voicemail with Jott that will be transcribed into an email and sent to her inbox. Nice!

Scenario #2: I like to use Twitter and so when I am traveling, or away from my computer, I can send a text message from my cell phone to Twitter. I can use Jott to plug-into Twitter. So by calling a telephone number, I can update my Twitter status. No clumsy text messaging on my small phone keypad required. Nice!

Scenario #3: I’m a Blogger – as you know. I learned that Jott has a plug-in to Blogger! So now blog posts can be made by voice using Jott! Nice!

Scenario #4: I use my email inbox as my ‘things-to-do-list’. I often find myself sending myself an email to remind me of something I have to do. Well, now I can do this while I am away from the computer. A call to Jott and I can send myself an email reminding myself of something. Nice!

I definitely had the ‘eureka’ moment today after only using Jott for an hour. I will use it for a month and report back the pros and cons of Jott as a comment to this post. If you use Jott, let us know how you like it and how you use it by leaving a comment below.

Note to Canadian readers: Jott's 1-866 number will not work so long distance charges may apply. Major cities have a local number and you can find the list here.

[Note: phone image, originally uploaded by Liquid Lucidity. Usage licensed by Creative Commons.]

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