ed.Voicethread as a speech and listening tool in Foreign Language
In response to the assignment:
This week, you will design two technology-based learning activities for your target group of learners. In the Learning Activities section of the wiki, find your page and post to it a description of two learning activities you design for your learners. Explain 1) your learning goal or what you hope to accomplish with each one, 2) describe the technology you will use, and 3) justify your choice of technology or technologies based on the cost, usability, and how well it addresses your learning goal. Provide links and descriptions of any Web-based resources you will use.
Activity B — ed.Voicethread as a speech and listening tool in Foreign Language
One of the most difficult things to do during foreign language acquisition is to verbally produce language. Students can listen to and comprehend simplified language quite early, and through training can read level-appropriate text. Even writing is commonplace in the early stages of most traditional language teaching programs. When students are asked to speak, often a look of fear or anxiety is visible to me. Part of this is the concept of an affective filter. When asked to spontaneously draw upon their knowledge of the language, students freeze up and make excessive mistakes. This is summarized on the website learner.org in the teaching foreign languages section:
In order to create the low-anxiety environment that is called for by Dr. Krashen and his colleagues, I will employ a series of oral practice assignments to prepare students for the end-of-year oral proficiency interview in 8th grade German.
My learning objectives are:
- Lower the anxiety level surrounding spontaneous speech in the foreign language.
- Increase fluency by providing a safe environment to practice speaking aloud in the target language.
- Respond appropriately to spoken and visual cues in the target language.
These objectives directly address the Communications Standard of the National Standards for Foreign Language .
By design the method of these activities should vary in order to expose students to different conversational environments that may arise. The activities are not simply “conversations” as that would immediately raise the affective filter. Instead, the teacher designs activities which simulate conversational situations, or simply provide a safe place for students to record their responses to prompts and review the result with the option to re-record.
Sample Activities — (inspired by the suggestions at Penn State World Campus )
Basic Level:
Student Bios/Personal Collage — Students create a VoiceThread with pictures from their family and lives. They record a narration about themselves and their family members in the target language. (Advanced: make the assignment into an interview, students ask questions in the VoiceThread and the author responds in the target language.)
Guided discussion – Students are broken into small groups and assigned to a teacher authored VoiceThread. The group then comments on the photos or videos presented, in the Target Language.
Advanced Level:
Narrate events in a story — although more presentational in nature, the activity encourages students to take risks with language to make a story more fun and exciting. Students often try to outdo each other with the silliest storyline.
Students-as-teachers/Virtual Field Trips — Students are assigned to research a city in Germany. As their final report-out, they create a VoiceThread with media spotlighting the attractions in the City. They record themselves giving a virtual tour of their city. (Even More Advanced – students ask and answer questions on each other’s VoiceThreads.)
(2) This technology is easily accessible from school computer lab facilities. The basic requirements are: 
- Web-capable computer
- Functioning microphone
- Functioning speakers
- ed.Voicethread subscription
For this activity I will be using our department’s Logitech Premium USB Headset Microphones. These headsets retail online for around $50 each. We purchased a class set of 35 at a lower price using education discounts. These headsets are the upper-end of what is required for recording. The benefit of buying higher quality equipment is the quality of sound recorded.
ed.Voicethread.com is Free for an individual account, although there is a one-time $10 fee for validating educational users. The ed.Voicethread section has the added benefit that content can be placed with a walled-garden of validated educational users. This means that, if i choose to allow it, my students could interact with students from all over the world who are registered through ed.Voicethread.
A teacher may register his or her students for an annual fee of $60, or a school may purchase VoiceThead accounts for all students $1 per user per year.
As this explanation is getting rather lengthy, I will allow the following example to explain the functionality of VoiceThread.
More on voicethread: What’s a VoiceThread anyway?
(3) Based upon my own initial user experience, and that of my students there is a small learning curve for end-users when they first try to use VoiceThread. The interface is intuitive, especially for anyone with experience using Web 2.0 tools online. From an administrative standpoint, I would say that the set-up of user accounts and the backend administration is moderate, requiring import of comma delimited files of student usernames and passwords. Once the accounts are created, it is easy to assign students to groups and create the initial Threads. Recently (2/8/09) ed.Voicethread upgraded their administrative tools to improve user experience.
I find the cost of this tool to be a great bargain. For $60 I have registered over 1/3 of the students in my school to use VoiceThread for my class. This is about 200 students. For the initial run of voicethread, the fee was paid out of pocket. (I’ll get it back when I submit my taxes this year.) I hope that future costs will be covered by the departmental budget. The additional costs of the microphones was previously covered for local audio recording, but have been an investment with multiple uses including VoiceThread recording, Listening Comprehension testing, Podcast recording, etc.
Finally, VoiceThread proves to be a great collaborative tool with implications in any classroom. It is particularly useful for Foreign Language, but dozens of examples of collaborative presentaions in other disciplines exist. Other applications of VoiceThread incude peer feedback on assignments, reflection and much more.
One of our first Voicethreads:
http://ed.voicethread.com/share/296135/
Web Resources:
Affective Filter -Dr. Stephen Krashen’s Website
Foreign Language Standards – http://www.actfl.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=3392
VoiceThread – http://ed.voicethread.com/
Penn State World Campus Resources – https://courses.worldcampus.psu.edu/public/faculty/studentactivities.html#virtual
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