Voice Threads

In many ways, this software provides a way for students to collaborate in groups to produce an authentic task, something that Robinson found to be highly effective in language production. The students in Brazil who put together the slide show for the Brazilian EFL teacher's voice thread worked on an authentic task to produce an item that was then publicly posted for the world to comment on. This also looks like it would be fairly straight forward to put together, so students would potentially not be met with an overly complex task that would produce anxiety.

Using Chapelle's criteria for evaluating a good CALL speaking tool, it does seem to provide a "good fit" for the learner since it is all recorded externally, so students would be exposed to whatever range of dialects that teachers see fit. The voice threads that I watched all appeared to be based around photos, so there is not really any explicit teaching happening. I could see this working if there were photos of people working on how your mouth should look when producing a certain sound and then having students record their own attempts at doing this. There is certainly a lot of interaction with the computer, and potentially with other students via a computer, so these all seem to play in favor of using voice threads. Also, the voice recordings that students leave would allow the instructor to evaluate student performance. As for feedback, I am not sure how successful that would be in such a public forum. However, the program definitely allows students to explore outside the classroom.

My personal opinion about Voice Threads is that they could have many different uses in a classroom. I could see them functioning very well in a setting where distance-learning was an issue, or if a teacher wanted to ask students to work collaboratively on a project (similar to responding to a post in Blackboard or in a Wiki). It seems like the instructor would have to plan this out very carefully for it to work effectively. Also, it seems like students would have to become more familiar with the software--several participants were having obvious issues understanding if they were being recorded or holding the mic close enough to their faces. Overall, I think that this has the potential of being a very successful outside of classroom tool.