VoiceThread is an exciting Web 2.0 software that adds sizzle to your class by letting students interact with you, each other, and your content asynchronously by voice or text. Language practice, presentations, art exhibitions…., the use of this software is limited only by your imagination.
Professors Susana Domingo and Susan Mraz, in Latin American and Iberian Studies, are two of a growing number of UMass language faculty using VoiceThread, an online cloud-based software. Presenting together at the CIT/Library/EdTech Conference, they shared their creative use of VoiceThread and IPads to increase student interaction. Their engaging lessons can serve as models for other language professors and spark ideas for faculty in other disciplines.
Susana Domingo shared a very engaging lesson in which students used one VoiceThread activity to practice four foreign language skills. While VoiceThread content can be presented in multiple formats, including video and audio, in Susana’s lesson, the content was presented as slides of photographs by Mexican writer/photographer, Juan Rulfo. To complete the assignment, students read an article by Rulfo, and then creatively synthesized grammar learned in class with their thoughts about the article, the photographs, and their views about whether a photograph merely captures an image or tells a story as well. By synthesizing these four language skills into one VoiceThread activity, students with differentlevels of skills and experience were able to participate together. The activity was not self-contained. It was the beginning of a conversation that continued into the next classroom meeting. Thus the VoiceThread activity was not done in a vacuum. It fit seamlessly into the pedagogy of the larger course.
Susan Mraz, who received this year’s Award for Leadership in Teaching with Technology in Web-Enhanced
Environments, presented various VoiceThread activities from her classroom, some done using the VoiceThread app on iPads. She explained how she uses VoiceThread to support three pedagogical practices: student presentations,storytelling, and oral listening and practice. She demoed a lesson used in her advanced grammar class in which the assignment was to focus on a particular grammatical element, e.g., narration in the past tense, and then create a VoiceThread narration using that grammar. The use of the grammar had to be obvious to the teacher as well as to the students. The result of this lesson was a deeper understanding of the grammar element, speaking practice for the narrator aswell as listening practice for the others in the class.
In an intermediate class Susan created PowerPoint slides containing the text of a short story. First she read the narration while the students looked at the slide read along. Next, the students read the narration from the slide. This activity was double pronged. Students experienced listening while reading and reading while speaking. This resulted in a multi-modal experience, which recent studies have shown lead to better learning outcomes. For more information about these and other class activities you can visit Susan’s website.
You might also be interested to know that UMass has a license with VoiceThread, offering you advanced features that enable you to maximize your use of the software. To sign up for a VoiceThread account, please visit our VoiceThread wiki at http://voicethread.wikispaces.umb.edu.
