I have mentioned in previous posts the need to get creative with content, assignments, and feedback, especially with everything online in our near future. In this post, I’d like to suggest a tool that I know faculty already use: VoiceThread. It’s been around a while but I do like it for specific purposes.
I have not used it much (yet) but it looks like it has interesting possibilities. I’m using the free version here and I have to bump against limitations. So far, I have used it in situations where the content I have is mostly visual and I don’t have any particular text that needs including. I just line up my series of visuals, add an audio track. VoiceThread will caption your audio (see the video).
However, as always, because of the accent thing, I had to bypass the automatic captioning. Instead, I downloaded the audio track, uploaded it in Camtasia, cleaned up the caption, save the .srt file and uploaded that back to VoiceThread. I should also note that the automatic captioning takes several days if you let VoiceThread do it (and, in my case, I would still need to clean up the captions, which can be done within VoiceThread) and I just don’t have the patience for that. I’d rather just do it myself and be done.
From what I can tell, the individual educator version allows you to add 50 students so they can create their own voice threads, which can make for interesting assignments, since you can include voice / audio feedback and others can add comments in various formats.
Here is the demo video:
And here’s the example I used in the video:
As always, thanks for reading.
Christine
