Example Voice Thread Project

Hey everyone, I hope your Golden Week has been a restful time.

As you know, the first major project in this class will be the VoiceThread story that you create and share with the class. I will be posting details about this assignment to the Moodle in the coming days. Until then, I'd like everyone to browse through some random VoiceThreads to look for examples of how make an effective slideshow story.

One thing to keep in mind is that you will want to create an VoiceThread that invites viewers to leave comments. Part of the evaluation for the project will be the number and quality of comments given to one another's work.

Below is an embedded VoiceThread that I think is rather effective. I like the way the creator uses images, voice and text to explain a difficult concept. I also like the thoughtful and encouraging comments provided by his classmates and instructor. What do you think of it? Please leave comments to this blog post with your impressions.



Additionally, please make similar posts to your blog of examples of good VoiceThreads. Explain why you think the example you've chosen is a good one.

Please Feed the Ants

Found this embedded Flash thing at Wonderfl via the DE Tools site.

Ants - wonderfl build flash online

YouTube emｂed demo

This is a video that really changed my life, no really it did!

Here is a quick blog post with a picture of the little dude from the carnival.

A possible blogging process

Several students have asked me what is the best way to do a blog post. I don't think that there is one definitive answer to the question. Ultimately, I think that the blogger wishes to share some idea or resources with an audience.

Let's use this blog post as an example. I wanted to let my readers (students in the class) know about a few tools I've been using in my online life that might be relevant to the work we are doing in this class. I then composed the following post:

I recently discovered a useful blog which features free online resources for students and educators called DE Tools of the Trade.

The image with the post was found on one of the sites mentioned on the DE Tools blog. I used another image from Design Comics in the Test VoiceThread that appeared in an earlier blog post here. Check the class moodle to find a few sample images if you are interested in this sort of thing.

To add the text caption to the image, I uploaded the image I got from Design Comics to Aviary which is a free online image editing site. After I edited the file in Aviary, I then uploaded it to blogger and made this post.

All of this is to say, that I believe that in addition to the message you compose for your blog posts, it is also worthwhile to include images and links to outside sources that might be of interest to your readers.

Any thoughts?

First Test

Twitter for Beginners

If you'd like to learn about Twitter before we talk about it in an upcoming lesson, you might want to read Paul Boutin's "Twitter for Beginners" which appeared in the New York Times in March 2009.