Faculty Resources
Voice Thread
A possible solution to audio problems with student projects:
With student produced presentations, the audio portions are usually the biggest problem. Incompatible microphones, finnicky sound cards, volume / input settings, lost audio files. An online application called Voice Thread gets around the audio problems by offering voice input in multiple ways, including inputting comments on presentation slides via telephone. VoiceThread may be a good fallback system that you can recommend to students who are unable to resolve audio problems and complete their assignments.
Heather Schmuck , Radiology Program Instructor, has been using Voice Thread
for student projects for the past year or so. She shares her reactions / suggestions / student comments below.
My only suggestion would be to introduce the software in class or on a streamed lecture as some of my students struggled with getting their account set up and then knowing what to do from there. Otherwise, the assignment went off without a hitch. I did a case study that involved some critical thinking situations and what would you do in this situation or what do you see wrong in this situation scenarios. I offered it for extra credit in the particular class that I used it in just to see how well it would go over. I’m using it this semester for group presentations in my online class where they are presenting a problem, steps to resolve the problem then explaining the resolution. Other groups are then required to comment or ask questions of the authoring group of which the group will have to respond. I’m anxious to see how well the participation and engagement works because my previous assignment just had an initial post.
Here’s a sample of what I did last year:
http://voicethread.com/share/1791627/
Student comments on assignment
