Thinglink & Voicethread . . . which to use?

The conundrum: a Spanish teacher wants her students to explore a piece of art and create a digital presentation. She'd like the presentation to include students speaking, links/videos to external sources, and the ability for students to work collaboratively.

Thinglink and Voicethread both allow for all of these, but they each have benefits and drawbacks.

Here's an example of a Voicethread (poor Dave Baroody is always my example):


The benefits I see: Voicethread's commenting process is simple, it's easy for groups to collaborate because Voicethread was built for conversations, students can draw on a picture as they speak to point viewers to details of paintings, and the groups could have more than one slide per presentation, so they could present more than one image. ALSO, because it's made for collaboration, there's also the possibility of sharing a Voicethread with a Spanish class from another school and connecting across schools.

The drawbacks: the comments are linked to a person rather than a part of the image, and so a person viewing the presentation doesn't know what the comments will be about until she's already pressed the comment. That makes the content of the presentation feel more about the conversation than it feels about the content.

The other option is Thinglink:
Benefits of Thinglink: It's pretty. Really pretty. And the comments are a part of the image, so it's very much a presentation tool, too. Students can collaborate by allowing each other to edit their image.

Drawbacks: Making a class as an educator seems like it would be frustrating. All links have to be external, so if a student wants to add a voice recording or a video, she has to know how to use Soundcloud or youtube respectively. The students can figure these things out quickly, but the number of steps means a larger likelihood of error, a larger digital footprint, and more class time devoted to negotiating the technical aspects of the program.

So, which would you use? I'm torn.

Happy Collaborating

I've been thinking today about when collaborating really, really works for me as a tech coach. Over the past two weeks, I had a wonderful experience of collaborating with Mr. Rich, a Latin teacher. He had this incredibly helpful analysis sheet that he has been using with students for 25 years, but he wanted to modernize it to meet 21st-Century collaborative learning goals.

I did not understand the Latin part of it.

But when Mr. Rich explained the Analysis Sheet to me, it sounded like, if I could find a way to make drop-down menus in a Google Sheet, there was an online method would meet his intentions perfectly. So I Googled that, and I made the least useful drop-down menu in the history of the world:

Here's how you do it: choose data, select validation, select list of items, type in your list and separate with commas, select save. That's it. I thought, OH! I'm done. Except, I did not understand the Latin, and it turns out that those selections don't actually mean anything.

That was okay, though, because then Mr. Rich and I sat and he explained Latin to me, and we plotted out what the sheet would look like, and I taught him a few things about formatting, and then he went home, watched a webcast about sheets, and built the rest of it.

This morning, Mr. Rich presented about the Analysis Sheet and how it's working with students. In attendance were a Latin student, another Latin teacher, the head of informational technology, the head of the upper school, and me.

Mr. Rich talked about piloting the sheet in his Latin class, describing the ways the students were able to work on the sheet at the same time, in real time, collaborate, take on leadership roles and (this was my favorite) participate from home. He also explained how the sheet didn't provide the translation. Rather, it helped students through analysis collaboratively, and then individual students were able to translate the Latin. Also, he referenced the book we're all reading as a teaching community, #EdJourney by Grant Lichtman.

So then my heart was bursting with thoughts about participatory learning, distributed expertise, design, authentic audiences, and other learning theories that make me happy.

Then my negative side thought, "Wait. I didn't do anything. I just figured out how to make a drop-down menu."

I told my negative side to be quiet, and I thought about some of the reasons that collaboration worked. So, here's my analysis of why it was such a great collaboration.

1. It was a specific change. The goal was completely manageable because Mr. Rich wasn't trying to change everything. He was just trying to change one thing. How scary is it when you think you need to change everything about your classes all at once?
2. It aligned with Mr. Rich's curricular goals. The Latin Analysis Sheet isn't tech integration for the sake of tech integration. The first goal of the sheet is to help students to be better at Latin. The facts that it's collaborative, able to be worked on from anywhere, and available in real time are great, but the Latin is still the point. (I feel like this aligns with the 'redefinition' aspect of tech integration in the SAMR model)
3. Mr. Rich wanted to make the change. I don't think that it would have been enjoyable in any way if Mr. Rich had felt forced to change. Because we were both invested in a similar way, our work together was fun.
4. I didn't worry about being the Latin expert and Mr. Rich didn't worry about being the tech expert. We used each other's expertise to make a product better than either of us could have achieved individually.
5. I spent more time listening and asking questions than I did talking. This, I think is actually the biggest key to collaboration. I'm a bit of a butterfly about tech, flitting from idea to idea. I could suggest a million toys to any teacher with whom I collaborate. But if I had, Mr. Rich would have been overwhelmed and annoyed. I feel like, with this collaboration, because I listened to Mr. Rich, he was able to own the project.

So, yes, all I contributed was a drop-down menu, but I'm still really proud of myself. That Latin Analysis Sheet is amazing.