Let´s Use Voice Threat

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VoiceThread is a learning tool for enhancing student engagement and online presence.
 With VoiceThread, instructors and/or students can create, share, and comment on images, Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, videos, audio files, documents, and PDFs, using microphone, webcam, text, phone, and audio-file upload. (Indiana University, 2019)

Linguistic skills can be reinforced with this tool

Whis tool provides an excellent option to reinforce students´ speaking skills. Also, it can be sused to help student pratice listening by listening to teacher´s or other classmates´audios. 

Activities That an EFL Teacher Could Carry Out Using Voice Threat

Activity #1- The teacher creates a forum on Voice Threat based on the topic that he/she and his/her students are working on. He/she can start the forum by uploading a video of he/she introducing the topic. At the end of the video, the teacher asks students a question about that topic that includes students giving their opinion about it. Students will watch the video, and record a spoken message in which they asnwer the question that the teacher posses at the end of the video. The teacher can assessed this assignment with a rubric scale.

Acrivity #2- The teacher asks students to make groups (number depends on the quantity of students). Then, the teacher will assign each group a specific topic; or give them options of different topics, and let each students choose the one that they like the most. After that, the teacher will ask each group to record a video in which they talk about that topic (the teacher should be specific about what he/she wants students to include in the video and the legth of the video). At the end of the video, each group will posse a question that promotes discussion. When the video is ready, each group will create a forum using Voice Threat in which they upload the video and include the question. When all the forums have been created, the teacher will ask all students to participate in all the other groups´forums. Each student will enter to the other´s groups forums, watch the video, and asnwer the question of each forum. The teacher can assess the oral production and  participation with a rubric scale.

Activity #3- The teacher will ask each student to choose one of his/her favorite tourist attraction of the country. Students will create a video in which the talk about that place (the teacher should be specific about what he/she wants students to include in the video and the legth of the video). The teacher will create a forum using Voice Threat. He/she will star the forum with an introduction of the topic tourist attrataction and talking about his/her favorite one. After the video, the teacher will asks students to upload their videos as comments. All students will watch to their classmates´videos and choose the one that caught their attention the most, and will comment on it orally. The comment can be brief; it depends on what each student wants to comment about the video.  The teacher can assess the oral production and  participation with a rubric scale.

Tips

I have some recommendations if you as a teacher can use Voice Threat for teaching.

1. First of all, you have to make sure that all your students have acces to good internet connection.
2. Also, you must consider that for using this tool, students will need a smartphone or computer, so make sure all of them have one.
3. If you use this tool for evaluating writing, you should prepared a scoring rubric to assess your students´ production and participation.

I want to include a Protocol that I had to prepare for one of my major courses. In this Protocol I created some activities for EFL students in which they use Voice threat, so I invite you to take a look at it. It may will give you ideas about how to implement this tool with your students. This is the link https://bit.ly/2QfNhcs

Voice Threat is really useful for teaching and learning purposes. The speaking interactive option that it offers can be usefu for teachers if they want to hepl students improve their speaking as well as listening techniques. It a very interesting tool that teachers should take advantage of.


Reference

Indiana University. (2019). About voiceThread. Retrieved from https://kb.iu.edu/d/bduw