Voicethread

Voicethread is a software program that  allows many different people to comment on your photos, videos, etc. anywhere in the world for free!  According to the website: "A VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images, documents, and videos and allows people to navigate slides and leave comments in 5 ways - using voice (with a mic or telephone), text, audio file, or video (via a webcam)."  I spent a LOT of time today trying to figure out how to set up an account for myself and then to register each one of my students.   The company did send me this document on thier Class Manager that was very helpful in setting up my classroom account. My main difficulty was finding a way to set up each student without using thier specific email addresses. 

If your students have their own school email addresses its quite simple, you just send them an email with a link to join.  My students do not have email addresses and I wanted to be sure this would be secure so no-one from the outside could access thier account.  Although on the website it states it the student is under 13 or does not have a valid e-mail adress you can set up a VT (Voicethread) Username which formats the account to look like an email adress based on the domain name you chose for your account.

I was able to set up individual accounts for each of my my students by setting up a VT Username for each and their sign on were simple just their first name and first letter of their last name. I already had photos of each of them I took on the first day of school for our photo puzzle that I was able to use for thier account icons. I made the password the same for everyone. I had decided I was going to log each student in myself before they recorded their observations so it did not matter. I had no webcam or external microphone to use so I decided to use my cellphone to let the students record their observations.

The students loved to record their observations on voicethread and loved to hear all the students observations. I felt the students took this much more seriously because they were being recorded. I felt they got so much more out of this exercise due to the thrill of recording on the website.