Voice Thread for Online Communication and Collaboration

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Hi, 😀Beijing colleagues. Staying in room for my assignments these days make me recall the moments when we had online classes during the period of pandemic. We were all confused with how to draw students’ attention to our lessons and make them participate in the learning. Today I am to introduce a tool called VoiceThread (https://voicethread.com/), which could help us with online teaching and interaction with students after class.


Voice Thread is a platform where students develop critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity skills. Firstly, we upload educational images, documents and videos to Voice Thread platform, and then students can make comments on the items that you upload. Students can choose whichever form they like to make comments, such as video, audio, written comments, etc., and they can insert comments at any point in the video. For instance, students can make comments or ask questions relating with the teacher’s video of instruction in reading paragraph. Regarding the parts that they are confused about, they can underline or circle the parts which they need help with. Students can make comments on the teacher’s digital materials whenever they want. Thus, this gives students enough time to think, participate and collaborate.

The following is a  video that I uploaded to Voice Thread. Studetns can insert comments in it and I will respond to their inquiries and opinions on this platform. 

https://voicethread.com/share/22641889/

In TOEFL class, students could also use Voice Thread to present their assignments or group work. This is a golden opportunity to practice speaking skills in public. In order to do this well, they need to organize their speech, structure the content of items, and finally clearly address the speech to audiences. Classmates could make comments on the uploaded item and then they collaborate on one single project in order to explore more and gain more.


                 (making comments on presentation that teacher and classmates uploaded on Voice Thread)

However, learning and sharing on Voice Thread platform demands high level of learning autonomy and motivation on the part of students. And this form of interaction might negatively widen the gap between excellent learners and weak ones. From this perspective, we need to appropriately employ this tool and encourage every students to shine.

🙋Beijing colleagues😀The following is a video presenting details in using Voice Thread. Watch it and have a try at Voice Thread.




Comments

  1. YifanApril 13, 2023 at 6:28 AM

    This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. YifanApril 13, 2023 at 6:29 AM

    Thank you for your sharing! I will try Voice Thread for my future classes.

    ReplyDelete

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