VoiceThread is a Web-based program that can be used to create multimedia slide presentations that can be annotated with voice, webcam video, and text comments. Rapidly growing popular for use in higher education due to its quick and easy enrollment in free accounts, it is a powerful media aggregation tool for capturing group conversations revolving around an image, document, or video.
Similar to how a conversation in a traditional discussion board forum is composed of threads, a VoiceThread is the combination of a collection of slides and the audio-visual comments that have been added to it. Digital media that can be imported into a VoiceThread media album include: PDF documents, PowerPoint slides, Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, images, audio files, video files, and text. Additionally, VoiceThread provides tools to pull content from popular media sharing Web sites like Flickr and Facebook.
Although comments are asynchronous in that contributions to the conversation can be added at any time, VoiceThread can be thought of as a more visual, socially interactive version of a discussion board or blog.
To get started with using VoiceThread, please see the embedded PDF tutorial below or click on this link to view the tutorial in a new window.
Additional Tutorial Resources
VoiceThread Tutorial: What is a VoiceThread
Microphone Setup for Windows XP PCs
How to Embed a VoiceThread on a Webpage
Commonly Asked Questions about VoiceThread