March 25, 2010

Adding instructor or student created audio can make a class more interactive and engaging.  In this session, three faculty members discussed why and how they and their students created audio. 

Judith Aponte talked about how she used a tool called VoiceThread to allow students to share their presentations with others in the class.  Professor Aponte's students created PowerPoint presentations, uploaded them to VoiceThread and added audio comments to each slide.  These VoiceThreads were shared with the entire class.

Ronnie Ancona discussed how she used Wimba Voice Tools to help students develop their speaking and listening skills.  Professor Ancona used Wimba Podcaster to create examples of spoken Latin for her students to help them learn pronunciation and meter. Students in the class are using the Voice Discussion Board to record themselves speaking Latin. 

Brian Lym discussed how he and Lauren Yannotta used podcasts as a means of assessment.  Students in their class were asked to create podcasts describing how they would go about researching a particular topic.  Students created one podcast at the beginning of the semester and a second podcast at the end of the semester.  They were asked to listen to the two podcasts and write a summary of what they had learned and how their approach to doing research had changed over the course of the semester.

Help Documents

• About VoiceThread
  An asynchronous online communication and collaboration service that facilitates group conversations around an artifact. Instructors can upload and share images, slide shows and videos with students and collaborators.
• Using VoiceThread
  Judith Aponte's instructions for her students.

• About Voice Tools
  A suite of tools that allows you and your students to communicate and present content using audio recordings within Blackboard.
• Using Voice Tools
  Overview of the tools in the Voice Tools suite and brief instructions about how to use them.

Additional Resources

• Description of Judith Aponte's FITT project
• Enhancing Latin 201 with Audio
  Slides from Ronnie Ancona's presentation
• Description of Ronnie Ancona's FITT project
• Using Podcasts for Learning Assessment
  Slides from Brian Lym's presentation