VoiceThread

VoiceThread is a presentation and storytelling tool for the web, iOS, Android, and Chrome. It provides users a platform to create and share media projects that incorporate video, image, voice, text, and drawing. There's a VoiceThread product for a broader consumer audience and one for educators called Ed.VoiceThread. Ed.VoiceThread offers a more secure environment and is the focus of this review.

Combining select features of tools like GarageBand and Flipgrid, users create digital stories by uploading audio, files, images, URLs, or videos and then add their own commentary in the form of text, audio, video, or drawing. Stories are organized into slides that other users can click through and then potentially comment on, depending on permissions. Users can add contacts and create groups that allow them to share and collaborate on stories with each other. Students can be added by teachers with just usernames. There's also a private messaging feature between students and teachers with a few different customization options.

When a project is complete, users choose from a wide variety of options regarding privacy, sharing, comment moderation, embedding, and more. These options will be different depending on the overall administrative settings. Notably, teachers have access to edit student work, and this extends both to content and to the permissions applied to stories.

VoiceThread is an old standby in edtech and continues to offer a unique platform for learning as a creator and through meaningful feedback. Students who use VoiceThread to create presentations or stories will benefit from the process of finding quality content, sequencing it, and then practicing speaking skills and demonstrating their knowledge. On the flip side, students will learn to give or receive feedback. Of course, quality feedback will be more likely when classmates are supported by teacher guidance, intent moderation, and solid classroom norms. It'd be nice to see some support for these skills in the platform -- if only just some tips that get users to pause and think before commenting. Browsing community content, in theory, could have some benefits, but the resources range in quality, and there are quite a few that are outdated. Digging into the community also pulls students out of the protected environment of the classroom-created and -managed work. 

While VoiceThread has made efforts to offer educators a more secure environment (and their policies are transparent), the platform can still be tricky to navigate when it comes to setting things up for privacy and safety. Teachers will need to be vigilant, setting behavioral policies and norms in the classroom, and making sure that the administrative account has appropriate security settings. As it stands, teachers can tweak things so that students' work remains private to a classroom, but it's challenging to restrict their access to the wider Ed.VoiceThread and VoiceThread communities, where they might comment on other users' creations (including with video and audio) and receive private messages from educators. The best way to set up a walled garden approach, where students are just interacting within their own school community, is through firewalling and use of a class or school domain.