Kristy: VoiceThread

VoiceThread is a tool I learned about during the Blogs, Wikis, and Web 2.0 book study I completed that Kiki Evans facilitated. I loved this book study, and I especially loved VoiceThread.

I finally got around to finishing a VoiceThread introduction to the author of this blog, me. The blog's other contributor - my husband - is interlaced as well.



Here is a VoiceThread I used in my Business Management class. The complexity of the questions progressed throughout the assignment, as it was the first time I utilized this tool in the classroom, and I was trying verify the students understood how VoiceThread worked and I was trying to inform the students about various business concepts. I was afraid to lose someone.



I personally prefer keeping VoiceThreads moderated, because it allows you to check for accuracy before accepting a post, checks for appropriateness, and keeps the students from hearing one another's answer just to cheat.

Kristy: Stixy - online creation collaboration

I recently discovered Stixy.com whenever looking up information on Wallwisher.com. I’ve used Wallwisher in the past to create a webpage where students (or people invited to your URL) can add their own posts to a webpage you started. I used this in Webmastering for students to claim the person they wanted to do their Black History Month project on, and we used it with our TLC Club to try to come up with a name for our teacher crafting group.

But I got frustrated by the limited functionality of Wallwisher, as you couldn’t really do more than post text up on the wall and many of the entries would overlap.

Stixy is like Wallwisher, but it has more options. You can create webpages for a variety of reasons. You can add appointments, documents, photos, or sticky notes to the page. You can customize color, font, font size, and font color, and you can move the posts around. The originating publisher can also choose whether or not to allow others to add to the page and what permissions to grant visitors.

Here is a Stixy page I created:


Simple and practical.