Voicethread Reflection

I see some real benefits to voicethread as a tool for sharing creative as well as some negative aspects that I encountered while going through the experience of creating my digital story. I think voicethread is a pretty useful tool and can be especially fitting for digital stories. Because many students are very creative and tech savvy, I think that voicethread presents an option that could be used in any classroom with internet access- particularly because it is a free resource. It can be very powerful for students to be able to make a creation and be able to share that creation with others. Peer involvement is also a big piece to voicethread that separates it from other similar tools. The ability for others to add insight is a piece that is nice for a classroom environment. Another use I see for this outside the classroom is a way for families to connect and share experiences. I can envision extended families enjoying the ability to share and describe their photos and videos easily and in a more unique way than through email or a blog. Even though this service offers an accessible, free way for people to connect and share, I found some faults. First, I didn’t feel like it was as user friendly or easy to use. I feel like the tools within imovie are much more self-explainable and simple. Voicethread’s “create” and “myvoice” tabs seem very similar and I kept getting confused by them. The aspect I was most frustrated with though was how laggy and slow it was. It took forever to load pictures compared to imovie. I tried to upload videos and left my computer for a while because it was taking so long. After coming back about 20 minutes later, the upload had made no progress, so I went without the video. Overall, I thought there were some pro’s and con’s- I might use it in my classroom but I’m not sure yet.