As an instructional technologist and graduate student, one of the most interesting things that happens to me is getting to experience tools or strategies that I work with professionally as a student. From the design and support side, you ask all the right questions and try to understand learners and instructional goals to design best-fit technology implementations and hopefully enhance learning. However, there is no substitute for the real-life experience of walking a mile in a student’s shoes by using ed tech tools as an actual enrolled, assessed, harried, busy learner.
Today I got that experience as an online class I am enrolled in at Western Oregon University’s MSEd-InfoTech program when we did an activity using VoiceThread. I have been using, recommending, and training instructors on use of this application for over two years —this was my first chance to engage with it as a “real” student.
VoiceThread
If you’re not familiar with VoiceThread, essentially it is a tool that allows the creation of “threads” of multimedia slides. Each slide might contain, for example, an image, text, a video, or a page of a Word document —really any multimedia that can be presented on the web. The hook is that people can then add audio or webcam comments to engage in a rich conversation about whatever the slide contents are. You can even record ink annotations that play back synchronously with your recording when others listen or watch.
In this particular instance, my assignment was to use VoiceThread to record comments and annotations critiquing design elements from a selection of about 30 slides showing different posters, magazines, flyers, etc. This could have easily taken place on a discussion forum, but VoiceThread afforded the opportunity for more personal and textured thinking and interaction.
I didn’t want to use VoiceThread in a “vanilla” way; that would be too easy. I wanted to push it a bit and see what I could do with VoiceThread. So instead of using the app through a web browser on my computer, I downloaded the VoiceThread app on my iPad Pro. I used BeatsX wireless headphones/mic to record audio comments and an Apple Pencil to make annotations.
Overall the experience was quite nice. Using the iPad app was intuitive for me as an experienced web user. I could swipe to navigate slides, and the multi-touch screen was nice to have so that I could zoom in on small images. The Pencil worked well enough for annotation. It’s better than using a mouse to draw (which is the only option in the web version). However you can tell that the app is not specifically optimized for the Apple Pencil, so it feels a little messy to draw with. One problem I had was with my headphones. For some reason after recording a comment via the headphone mic, I was not able to preview my recording at first. If I waited approximately 30-45 seconds on the preview screen, my audio suddenly began playing back. When I tested a recording without the headphones, I did not encounter this problem, and the recorded audio was on par or perhaps even a bit better from the built-in iPad mic.
Takeaways
Beyond the technical experience, I can say that as a student I got a lot of value out of being able to hear my peers voices and follow their thinking through simultaneous annotation. After spending a lot of time talking with the same people on a discussion forum all quarter, this was a nice change of pace, and one helped to enrich the sense of community in our class. At the graduate level, finding novel ways to facilitate peer interaction is a must. My courses are full of smart, insightful, funny people, and I appreciated the chance to get to know those of them that gravitated towards leaving audio or video comments a little better by listening and watching instead of just reading.