VOICETHREAD

I believe that this is a tool to be used when putting a presentation or a slideshow together in a group setting.  Being able to add comments either through text, voice or video is an innovative way of explaining your thoughts.  By listening to someone explain their thoughts rather than read them, it becomes easier to understand the context.  Just like in Google Docs, someone can comment while everyone is online at the same time or if one person cannot make the meeting they can add their comments for everyone else to read at a later time.  Using this tool in a teaching setting would also be beneficial for students as it would be more engaging to go online and have an open discussion about a teacher’s lecture from earlier that week.  Also the comments would be a great way for teachers to give their students an opportunity to earn participation grades.  That element would be most effective if there are some more conservative students that are intimidated to participate in class.

If I were to add Voicethreads to my PLE I believe it would be under collaboration tools.  There are tools I like better than Voicethreads however I do see the benefits of it.  As mentioned before I believe that this tool is best used for a teaching method and not so much the creation of group presentations for class.  Google Docs has a better platform when creating a PowerPoint for a class as it is easily transferred from the cloud to a personal computer with no formatting errors.