INNOVATIVE INSTRUCTION, CONT.

Now Comm 220 students are leaving their school supplies in the drawers and  are logging on to an internet-based application, Voicethread. Voicethread is a great tool, in this case, to let students' creativity run free. Voicethread gives students the options to upload pictures directly from Facebook, Flickr, or from their computer, and create a slide show. So instead of cutting words out of a magazine and pasting them onto a page to describe themselves, they can record their voice from a microphone or a cell phone that correlates to the slides. Students also have the option to upload videos, communicate via webcam, type text, and even doodle on the pictures.  What makes the Voicethread assignment more dynamic is that their families and fellow students can comment and add to the "scrapbook."  This wasn't possible with the paper version.  Merissa conveniently provides written tutorials to aid students through the creation of their own Voicethread project. However, Voicethread supplies videos on how to create your own as well.

This a great tool to increase communication between professors to students and students to students. Another feature of Voicethread is that you can comment on other students work. So as you can imagine, you can use this tool for peer editing, oral presentations, study abroad classes, story telling, showcase of art, and many others! Watch Marissa's interview to find out more about how she incorporates Voicethread and what she recommends to other faculty! Visit the TLT Blog!

MICROBLOGGING, CONT.                  

How can you use it in a genuine way in academia?This is the burning question.  Many people have written articles and posts about this topic and here is a cumulative list of ideas:

microblog software

  • Breaking News - for example Twitter users broke the story about a major earthquake in Mexico City before the USGS did. It's becoming a "first alert mechanism for dissemination of the news and for the immediate discussion surrounding that news."1
  • Soliciting Information - for example getting interview questions from the class before bringing in a guest speaker, allowing students to submit problems/questions the day before the class to help form the lecture.  Because a student can receive these messages via a cell phone they can easily send and receive this type of information.
  • Research - you can use micro-blogging applications to gather focus group style information.  Marshall Kirkpatrick (ReadWriteWeb) writes, "our questions get interesting replies from a diverse group of people we would never have thought to ask personally. We recognize that people using and replying on Twitter may not be generally representative of the population at large, but for qualitative interviews it's a tool that's hard to beat."2
  • Event Promotion
  • Story Creation - Paul Allison, a teacher at the East Bronx Academy for the Future, used a micro-blogging application to create a story where each of his students wrote 140 character chunk of the final product.  It was also done in conjunction with students in other countries. 3
  • Class Announcements
  • Building Classroom Communities
  • Follow a Professional - for example, Jim Long tweets about his journalistic experiences aboard Air Force One.  This gives students first hand contact with a professional in their field.  This real-time access can't be easily achieved in another way.4


Micro-blogging is by no means the end-all-be-all tool for every class or every situation but it has come along way and it is a tool worth looking at.  The beauty of micro-blogging is that you can start small, maybe only use it for class announcements just to get your feet wet.  It's really easy to use, just type 140 characters or less into a small box and you're on your way.  Try it out and let us know what you think.

Check out these article/posts for more ideas:


1http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_rise_of_twitter_as_a_platform_for_serious_discourse.php
2 http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_for_journalists.php
3 http://www.edweek.org/dd/articles/2008/06/24/01twitter_web.h02.html
4 http://twitter.com/newmediajim


TEST YOUR KNOWLEDGE

True or False.
A YouTube video is considered a streaming video.

answer on page 3