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VoiceThread at Emory

Emory’s Center for Digital Scholarship currently sponsors a site license for VoiceThread. This means that as long as you access it from your Canvas course, you shouldn't have to log in again. (Canvas passes your information through to Voicethread for your course so you can get started using it right away.)

Our Canvas team does not officially support Emory's Voicethread aside from linking to it, but Emory College has some great resources for you to get started. We have also included some basics in the links below. If you are having technical issues with VoiceThread specifically, please write to pro-support@voicethread.com

In Canvas, you can access VoiceThread through modules or assignments. Links to an external site.

To get started with a VoiceThread, there are some great resources and videos on their site:

https://voicethread.com/howto/canvas/ Links to an external site.

https://voicethread.com/share/5942721/ Links to an external site.

Why VoiceThread instead of another Canvas tool?

The Canvas community has a great post about the pros and cons of using VoiceThread in Canvas  Links to an external site.

here is an excerpt: 

Another question I hear a lot is why use VoiceThread, when you can just use a discussion board, especially since, in Canvas, the discussion board allows students to reply with audio or video comments. Here are a few reasons: <...>

    • VoiceThread includes a doodle tool, so that users can annotate the media they are discussing.
    • VoiceThread includes an option for students to leave comments by calling on their phone. Canvas discussions require audio comments be recorded and then uploaded.
    • VoiceThread allows comments to be moderated.
    • VoiceThread allows comments to be left on each slide of the presentation, so you can have multiple threads within a single VoiceThread.

 

That choice is up to the instructor, but this blog from a teacher has some examples of how it has worked for her and the time you can expect getting up to speed using it. From: https://www.teachthought.com/technology/10-tips-for-using-voicethread-for-learning/ Links to an external site.

You can think of a VoiceThread as a conversation around a slideshow of your own media files.  These media files can be your PDFs (you can export your Powerpoints or Keynote presentations to PDFs very simply), images, video files, audio files (for the music instructors out there), and more.  And you can mix the media so your VoiceThread could include, for example, four presentation slides, two images, a video, and three more presentation slides at the end.  Use your imagination!  When you have your media curated, you simply add your own comments in voice (using your computer’s microphone), video (using your computer’s webcam), or text (using the keyboard on your computer).  Then you share your VoiceThread securely with the Group you’ve set up for your class or give access to anyone you want who has access to the link or place it on the Browse page and make fully public.