Student, Cheri Weber’s midtern created for Irle Goldman’s Human Development course.

WHY I LIKE AND USE VOICETHREAD In My Counseling Courses
By Irle Goldman, PhD

1. Counseling is a relational, symbolic and creative experience. Having students describe it in a paper makes it too one-dimensional. It looses it’s depth and possibilities. Voicethread allows us to add pictures, voice, and video to create a richer, more useful and communicative product.
2. Voicethread allows the students to see each other’s work and learn from it. You have a more relational/mutual educational experience.
3. Voicethread allows students to react/respond to each others’ work in a way that’s easy to see and connect to. This helps to build community for the class.
4. Voicethread allows you to see the whole picture… all of the classes creations in one screen; all the pages of individual creations in another screen. I get a better sense of the whole gestalt.
5. Because of this, it is easier to mark. You can see what is included and missing in one-fell-swoop.
6. What the students produce is much more interesting to read/see/hear.
7. Because it uses so many modalities (kind of like life) the students tell me that it’s more interesting to create. They can start from a picture or a text or a song and build their piece of work around any of these and add to it and re-organize it.
8. I have used it for projects, for midterms and for finals in my Theories of Counseling and Human Development classes.
9. It is always available in the cloud.
10. It can be archived in a student’s portfolio.

Challenges: It takes a while to learn how to connect and use it and I have not yet figured out the way to communicate with students individually on it.