VoiceThread is a great web tool if you have never seen it. It allows someone to create a discussion around media, whether that media be images, videos, audio, text, whatever... So, say for instance you want your students to discuss elements of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. You could import an image of the painting from, say, Flickr's Creative Commons into VoiceThread, start the discussion by asking questions or making comments that will lead your students' comments.
Here is an example. The discussion creator explores the crisis in Darfur through political cartoons.
Math teachers often find it difficult to incorporate the web tools explored in the Challenge. Here is a simple idea for using Voicethread to, literally, illustrate various problem solving strategies.
So, how do you create a VoiceThread? Here is a short tutorial on the process created by yours truly!
When Dottie Black, my friend and colleague from the Duke-PepsiCo Technology Mentor Program, first told me about Scoop It, I thought she said, "stupid". Once I correctly heard her and she showed me what Scoop It does, I realized it definitely is not stupid! Scoop It is a topic-centric curating service. It allows you to collect resources from around the Web relevant to a certain topic. Rather than just listing links to the sites, it displays a stream of the sites you have embedded or searched for. So, for example, I have created a Scoop It about participants of the Fall 2011 DPS Technology Challenge and embedded the product below. Definitely NOT stupid!
