Photo of Higher Ed Online Technologies from Jen Hegna

Higher Ed Online Technologies from Jen Hegna

By Jen Hegna

Grades/Uses:

Description

I am an online Grad student in the Information and Communication program at the University of Wisconsin - Stout. VoiceThread was an excellent way for my team to co-present and reflect upon our journey in a online collaborative project this past spring.

Assignment

Once we agreed to use VoiceThread there really were no other steps. I had to develop the shell, email the team to get their feedback, then - after that it was pretty simple!

The goal of this project was to have each team member reflect upon tools we utilized to collaborate and complete our online project entitled - Disrupting TCS 702. VoiceThread came towards the end of the project. We needed a collaborative way to share our project with our class (audience), that was highly engaging, and asynchronous. I enjoyed the ability to text, use audio, and webcams. VoiceThread was an obvious tool.

Challenges

The only setback we had is that one of our participants has a satellite ISP connection and the audio was not working very well. She wound up going to the coffee shop and tapping into their wi fi connection. It would be nice if the free version allowed more Phone VOIP minutes. That is an excellent feature for those who do not have proper bandwidth to successfully pull it off.

Tools

Email, Skype, and our Wiki! It is an awesome feature to be able to embed VoiceThread widgets in other applications like our Wiki - http://uwstout-tcs702.wetpaint.com/.

Tips

Try it out and you will see how easy it is!

Variations

It would be nice if we could utilize Google Analytics for this project. Just to see who is visiting and where they are. The cell phone option is also great, but may need more than 3 min of time. I am very thankful we were able to complete this project utilizing VoiceThread. By the way… our team received an A for the project! Thanks Much!