by Elena Kostoglodova
As a long-time language instructor, I love practical resources. When I first learned how to use VoiceThread, I was very excited about its possibilities in my classroom and for semester-long student projects. For inspiration, I searched all over the internet to see what sort of interesting VT projects other language teachers had already come up with.
I found many great ideas on isolated web sites, but no centralized compilation of the possible uses of VoiceThread in a language classroom. Many web sites that do offer a number of ideas in one place are geared towards K-12 teachers and are not subject-specific and so oftentimes ideas presented would have a lot of relevance for 3rd grade math, but not as much for any other discipline/age group.
In my final project for the Teaching with Technology seminar I decided to bridge this gap by compiling a list of 25 fun ways in which VoiceThread can be used in a language classroom, so that other language teachers could view my presentation and immediately start generating fun VoiceThreads that would be relevant in their own language classes.
My presentation is organized in a very simple way. I first describe a distinct idea that could become a foundation of a foreign language VoiceThread. I then give a screenshot of an existing voicethread built around this idea and then the address of a web page, where it could be viewed or accessed. For some of the ideas I generated, I could not find any voicethreads already in existence, so I gave screenshots of those that either come close to my idea or incorporate some key element of it. Some of the sample voicethreads can be viewed by simply following the links given; others can only be accessed after a bit of browsing around on the initial page the browser jumps to.
I hope this compilation will be helpful to other language teachers/instructors and their classroom needs!
