Great Book Stories & VoiceThread

I just came across a wonderful multimedia project called Great Book Stories. It offers students and teachers the opportunity to share their favorite books through pictures, text and audio. The wiki links to digital stories created by students and teachers and encourages others to join in.

A number of tools for creating digital stories are mentioned, including VoiceThread. (I was looking for more info on VoiceThread when I came across this project.)

VoiceThread is remarkably easy to use. Within minutes of signing up, I’d loaded several photos from my flickr account into my first VoiceThread project and was ready to record some narration. Had I been able to face crawling behind my computer to reattach my microphone, I would have had a voice narrated photo show in less than 5 minutes. Amazing! Instead, my first story is narrated with text comments instead a voiceover – a handy option for those without microphones or who are microphone-a-phobic.

Stories can be public or private and can include text and voice comments. Comments can be open to all or moderated. What a great tool for group storytelling. Stories are hosted on the VoiceThread site and can be embedded on other web pages/blogs. VoiceThread is currently free and it hopes to stay that way. But they’re committee do stay free for educators and their students. I’m really impressed with VoiceThread.

And even more impressed with the creative use of it (and other digital storytelling tools) at Great Book Stories.

[coolplayer width=”480″ height=”360″] http://voicethread.com/book.swf?b=8125 [/coolplayer]