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Ed.VoiceThread

What it is: I have posted about Voice Thread in the past, but Voice Thread has added a new education community that has some pretty incredible features. Ed.VoiceThread is a secure collaborative network designed specifically for the k-12 school environment. Teachers and students can collaborate around almost any type of media including voice, text, webcam, and drawing commentary in a secure environment. Access is restricted to k-12 educators, students, and administrators to ensure safe classroom collaboration. Ed.VoiceThread is an accountable environment, which means that all users are responsible for their content and behavior. Some added features that you will find on Ed.VoiceThread are, students have individual accounts that are easily viewable to educators, students can create, edit, and manage their own portfolio, students cannot add contacts or send invitations to any users outside of the Ed.Voice Thread community, and they cannot view any content that is not created by an Ed.Voice Thread member. Teachers can quickly view and access all students’ Voice Threads. Voice Threads can be made private or public depending on the assignment and requirements. Ed.VoiceThread comes in two packages one free and the other, called Pro, for $60/year. Free users can only create 3 VoiceThreads, have 75 MB of storage, no uploading of MP3 comments, 30 min of webcam commenting, advertising will be present, single file size limit of 25 MB, and no downloads of the media. In the Pro version, students can create an unlimited number of Voice Threads, get 10GB of storage, can upload MP3 comments, have unlimited webcam commenting, 30 archival movie exports, no advertising, single file size limit of 100MB and allows downloads of media. How to integrate Ed.VoiceThread into the classroom: Ed.VoiceThread is the ideal place for students and teachers to collaborate and interact with digital media. The added functionality for schools with Ed.VoiceThread is very useful. Students can use Ed.VoiceThread to create digital stories, documentaries, practice and document language skills, explore geography and culture, solve math problems, and much more. As a teacher, I like VoiceThread as a place to teach. Because everything is web-based, you can upload a days lessons to Ed.VoiceThread for students to refer to and collaborate with while doing homework. I well remember the days when I would sit in math class learning the days equations. Everything made perfect sense to me while I was sitting in the classroom watching problems being worked. But at home, with no guide homework seemed impossible. Ed.VoiceThread makes you your students personal tutor. The self paced learning is amazing! I love giving students tools that allow them to be in charge of their own learning. Is there any better lesson in life than knowing how to learn? Tips: Try out the free Ed.VoiceThread account and see how it could work for your classroom. If you are like me, it becomes addicting and 3 VoiceThreads won’t be enough! Leave a comment and share how you are using Ed.VoiceThread in your classroom.

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You Are Your Words

Posted by admin | Posted in Analyze, Art, Character Education, Create, History, Language Arts, Middle/High School, Primary Elementary, Secondary Elementary, Teacher Resources, web tools, Websites | Posted on 27-03-2012

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

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What it is:  The American Heritage Dictionary has a new webtool that lets students create a self-portrait using their words.  Students can link to places where they have already written (Facebook or Twitter) or write something unique specifically for their portrait.  The unique image can be shared, saved and printed.  You Are Your Words works best in Firefox, Google Chrome, or Safari Internet browsers.  I’ve found that pictures with high contrast work better than pictures with similar coloring and low contrast.  After you create you image, you can adjust the colors, contrast and font.

How to integrate You Are Your Words into the classroom: You Are Your Words would be a great getting-to-know-you activity.  It would give students a neat way to share who they are with the class.  At the beginning of the year, a You Are Your Words bulletin board or classroom display would be a fun way for everyone to get to know each other.  This site could lead to really interesting discussions about the power that our words have, what they reveal about us, and how they impact people’s perception of us.
You Are Your Words would also be a great way for students to create a mini biography about a hero, person of interest, historical figure, etc.  Students could upload a picture and include famous quotes or words that describe the person.  These could be used as part of a larger project, or as an independent research project.  The site asks where the eyes and mouth of the picture are, so uploading another image or diagram to describe might not work.
Students can create character description cards with words, quotes and phrases that describe fictional characters in the reading they are doing.   If you have a class or small group that is reading the same book, each student can choose a character to do this for.  Create “trading cards” of the characters that students can create and share with each other so that each student has a card for each character in the book.  If students are doing an author study, they could create a “You Are Your Words” about the author.
As students are learning about different roles within government, they could create a You Are Your Words image about each position using a picture of the person who holds that position in government.  The writing could be related to the job description of the position.
The picture above is an example of a You Are Your Words image that I created with the words from this post!
Tips: If you have an iDevice, the Word Foto app works very similarly and lets you use ANY picture.  This allows students to define vocabulary words with pictures.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using You Are Your Words in  your classroom!

Comments (23)

Marcia Blum said on 27-03-2012

What a great post. Thank you for the resource, but more importantly – the ideas for integration.
Jacqui said on 28-03-2012

How do you find all these great websites!
admin said on 28-03-2012

Twitter :)

Sherri said on 03-04-2012

Hi! Do you know if there is a way to create the images but not have them appear in the public gallery? I made one and found that it was featured on the home page.
admin said on 03-04-2012

I don’t believe that there is a way to create them without them showing up in the gallery. Did anyone else notice an option to not display it publicly?
Jennifer Jones said on 12-04-2012

I keep getting an error message at http://www.youareyourwords.com….any ideas?
admin said on 12-04-2012

Yes, that is a bad link, use this http://www.youareyourwords.com/ link!
chris said on 09-08-2012

I cant get this to work :( just wondering what im doing wrong. It just keeps saying loading, any help would be great
admin said on 11-08-2012

It is pretty loaded up with flash content…bogs down depending on browser and plugins :/
Kaili said on 16-10-2012

For some reason I am not able to upload the photo, or at least it seems to take ages…
Alexis said on 17-10-2012

I have tried time & time again! It will not load! It just sits there forever! My friend even left it on all night, & when she woke up it still wasn’t loaded! Any ideas? I use safari & she uses google chrome plus both pics were under 1Mb! There shouldn’t be any problems!
admin said on 17-10-2012

Hmm, I’m not sure what the problem is there. We may need to contact the site and see if there is a plugin or something that is missing.
Donna said on 22-10-2012

I cannot get a picture to upload, any ideas??
Brittany said on 23-10-2012

I am not able to upload a picture, either. I’m using Safari. Any ideas? I really want to try this!!!!
Jennifer said on 28-10-2012

I am having the same problem with the picture not loading. I do not see a way to contact the site. Does anyone have an idea how to fix this issue?
admin said on 28-10-2012

I’m sorry…no idea how to make this work!
kristen said on 24-11-2012

I have been having the same problem for 2 days!! I want to try this site and it keeps saying it’s loading but never loads!
Alia said on 07-12-2012

I been having the same problem for a couple weeks… I have tried every couple days and it just keeps saying loading.
Catalina said on 11-12-2012

I loved the idea but try and try and my picture doesn’t load, reading the comments I see I’m not the only one with this problem
anyone know who may be failing? I have tried with Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome and none is …
or else some idea of how to achieve the same result with another page or technique?
Melissa said on 22-12-2012

Same issue :( Final picture does not load.
admin said on 09-01-2013

Boo! Seems to be BROKEN.
tina said on 13-03-2013

So frustrating…will this ever work? I have tried Google Chrome, Safari and Firefox…add the Captcha code..no prob…choose picture and then it loads and loads and loads..and nothing happens:(
admin said on 20-03-2013

I haven’t been able to get it to work for quite some time… SAD

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