VoiceThread: A Digital Storytelling Experience

There's a new trend in education: digital storytelling. Before yesterday's class, I had heard of it. Two of my past roommates each had to do one, and funny enough, both times were for education classes. This tells me it is becoming a "thing" within the classroom...or at least people want it to become one.

So, what is this digital storytelling idea? Simple. A person uploads some pictures and records a voiceover. Maybe it's just a person sitting in front of a webcam. Maybe it's text boxes floating over some pictures pulled from the web. The cohesive factor? A story worth telling.

When it comes to education, this idea seems useful. It's a way to combine creativity with education, especially in the case of a language classroom. It's also fun.

That's why when we were asked to use VoiceThread, I was open to the new experience. Working with Katie, we decided to create "A Day in the Life of an MA TESL Student." Here's the link: https://voicethread.com/?#q.b4058727.i0.k0 (Note: You might need to have an account and be logged in to view.)

Going back to the idea of evaluation, VoiceThread falls in the "fun and useful but with obvious downfalls" category. The fun idea is rather straightforward, and it comes down to the fact that you can pretty much create whatever you like with it. The useful part comes in with the potential applications the program can have in the classroom, especially as a speaking activity. In these ways, VoiceThread is pretty cool. It's layout is even clean-cut and shiny.

However, VoiceThread can be tricky. Because we did not upgrade to anything other than the free membership, it did not allow us to use more than eight slides. We tried. Unrelated to the account status, the we had issues with the recording function. It did not want to play back the recording, so we had no idea if anything worked until we tried it on a third computer. We also had some trouble getting the slides to match our voice. It actually took far longer than it really should have. Lastly, sharing the video is tricky and involves unnecessary steps. There's also no good way to know it's working and doing what you want it to do. 

There's a chance I would use VoiceThread in the classroom, but only if this was the best of the best when it comes to digital storytelling websites. I really like the activity; it's just the execution that is at times unnecessarily tricky. Good try, VoiceThread. Good try.