How I Came to Un-dread the Voicethread

This quarter, my classmates have impressed me with their knowledge and command of current technological innovations. What has been particularly thrilling is the usefulness of these applications. Our forward-thinking instructor, Dr. Darci Harland, introduced the course using a program I had never seen before. It was a slide presentation accompanied by the teacher’s voice and a pop-up window that presented the text of what was spoken.

“What a great way to present information,” I thought. “How neat that our teacher did that!” And then, one dark week, the professor urged us all to make a Voicethread of our own. Impossible. It might be hard!

Dr. Darci provided us with – of course – another voicethread giving us step-by-step instructions.

Hmmmm…make a PowerPoint^TM and then save the slides as jpeg files. We can save PowerPoint slides as jpeg files? Very useful information! I must admit that the process seemed a tiny bit complicated. I saved my slides halfway through and it stored them as individual jpeg files. Then I didn’t know if I could add more slides to that file so I continued on the regular PowerPoint and ended up with about four separate saved copies that I had to keep straight.

I created an account with Voicethread, and immediately began uploading my slides. Simple! Then I recorded my script. I don’t have a headset microphone, so sometimes I sounded a bit loud – I tend to be highly critical of what I sound like – but again, the process was easy. I forgot to type in the script and had to add it later. For some reason, I could not copy and paste from a Word document so I had to re-type my words – Hello! IT people? Was it something I said?

All in all, I really had a lot of fun making my first voicethread. After making my second, I realized these little slideshows could be quite addictive… the possibilities were limitless…

References

http://emmiepeace.edublogs.org/files/2011/03/32126-Clipart-Illustration-Of-An-Expressive-Yellow-Smiley-Face-Emoticon-With-One-Big-Eye-Stressed-Out-Or-Nervous-1eglcri.jpg

http://images.firstcovers.com/covers/flash/t/to_infinity_and_beyond-1585762.jpg?i

http://synergiseducation.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/VoiceThread_image.jpg

https://voicethread.com