I've been experimenting with something lately that I'm very excited about. It's called Voice Thread. It's essentially a way to add commentary or collaborate on a presentation that could be educational, story telling, or simply give someone instructions on how to do something. The uses are unlimited. It takes a bit of thinking in a different dimension, and I've made a few of them for different purposes. For instance, I made one that featured the recent Poetry Theatre that we had at the Satori Coffee house. I made another one that experimented with walking someone through an online learning environment that my boss is working with. The more I play with this voice thread the more ideas I have for how to use it.

Last year I attended a 90th birthday party for my only remaining great aunt on my mother's side of the family. This famiy had seven brothers and sisters, and this was the first time that the family had come together in many years. Many of the attendees were a new generation that had never met the people there and had no idea how they were connected. I built a website for this family,  but that website was limited to the initiative of the viewer to explore the various pages and see what was there. At this reunion, some of the older family members, children of the original brothers and sisters, brought photographs that they had and shared them. I put these on the website, but it seems that no one has actually made the effort to tie the images together in any meaningful way. I think it takes a story to tie it together, and that may be what Voice thread can do. In the next few weeks I think I'll try to pull together a narrative that uses some of these images to tell a story that will help engage the younger generation of this family to help them see where part of their heritage came from. It might actually work. We'll see.

In the meantime, go see Voice thread. www.voicethread.com. Check it out. Let me know what ideas you have for using it. I'm sure there are a zillion ways to use it that never would occur to me.

10:04:06 PM