Hi, I'm a big Voice Threat fan. This is Ben and Steve from Voice Threat. We love you. We are too. Hi, I'm an enormous Voice Threat fan. My professor at James Madison University is my advisor for my grad program, and I've been talking about it, and he loves it as well. Oh, that's great. I don't know, guys, I think you're about to open a Pandora's box, because last night on Cheryl's Shell, it got pretty crazed about Voice Thread. You're all the hild. We're all hildies. Did you know this? And Steve and Ben, my job is to have a critical frame, so. Good. No. No, no, no, no, no, no. Paul, tell the truth that you're the one that introduced this to all of us. And Joyce is there. Joyce, you say anything to Joyce, and she's already been doing it forever, right, Joyce? I went through all 87 pages tonight, Joyce. Thank you very much. Oh, and I have my-- Susan, I have a guitar if you want an exit audio. 87 pages. Well, here's the first, I think. What we're doing with Voice Thread Next is foreign language learning through Voice Thread. That's what we're doing, too. We got to get our kids to talk to each other. We have our first one up as of yesterday. We're doing our first one this week, so you beat me this time. No, you come on over and comment on ours. Oh, I'd love to. Okay, well, you know what? Let me have the class look at yours first so they'll get a model. Well, it's just a first. I mean, it's just-- It was one of my kids who did Voice Thread in my class came to me and said, "Saturday night, we have this Spanish project to do. Do you think I could do that?" I was like, "Yes, yes, come, come." That's what I'm going to do. That's fantastic. I'm going to virally push it out. The teacher loves it because, look, the listening to yourself and just the practice, authentic practice in the language and having the audience is just such a big deal in that curriculum. And it sort of saved the day. Well, you got the Spanish community up and ready to roll. Cool. That's great. And the instructions-- We have one in Maine, too. Yep. We have some teachers in Maine using it with their foreign language classes, too. Cheryl, let's give them into Youth Voices and the Spanish community, okay, to the community blog. Yeah. You know, it's Susan and Cheryl. This is interesting because my Spanish teacher just contacted me about whether or not I would do a collaborative project with her students. And this would be perfect for me to add mine. Yep, perfect. Welcome to Teachers Teaching Teachers. It is Halloween. And Susan at Mime has gotten back from the Halloween parade here in New York City. And she can tell us about that. She was dressed as a cow today. She-- a little private information there. And this is Paul Ellison in New York City. And I'm done with the trick-and-treaters who have come to my door. And we have a couple of special guests. We have some treats tonight. Joyce Valenza is joining us. Once again, Joyce was a-- if not always on a moving spirit this summer in August around-- a few shows we did around library databases. And she's helped us think about a lot of different things around information in libraries and so forth. So welcome, Joyce. Are you there, Joyce? Yeah, you know, I'm not used to unmuting and muting. So-- I know, the killer. The dreaded mute button. I recognize the silence, but-- I just had my first and last trick-and-treater. There you go. And that's Lee Baber from Virginia. Hello. Cheryl Oaks is with us as well. And yes, we also have Steve-- is it Merth Muth? A moose, like two o's. Thank you very much. I should have asked you before the show. But I'll just do it. Steve Muth and Ben Papel? Is that right? There you go. Perfect. Ben Papel from Voice Thread, the co-founders. Is that right, guys? Voice Thread? Yeah. That is correct. Describe yourselves. OK. And so we have a lot of people very excited. A lot of fans of Voice Thread. But I thought to slow it down a little bit and just have you tell us the story of where you got the idea and what you were thinking about and just kind of set us up with-- Sure. What does it mean to be co-founders of something? Well, I can just say, I don't let Steve tell the story because frankly, it was Steve's family that in a sense was the impetus behind Voice Thread. But I just will say that Steve and I have been best friends since junior high school. So the idea that we've done something together is really no shock to either of us. But the story of Voice Thread is actually hysterical. And I'll pass it to Steve. Well, basically, just to tell you why you have a co-founder is because you need somebody who is cookie enough to actually believe in your same vision, but at the same time, you'll listen to because it's a fine line between cookie and out to lunch. So you need to be cookie enough to believe an idea and you need to trust somebody enough to reign you in and say, you're out of your mind. It's time. We got back to work. So that's why you have a co-founder. But basically, the idea came from just a picture and everybody's got them, which is just a family picture that you look at and you realize that there's probably at least four, maybe six, or maybe 10 different stories and different perspectives about the same image. And this is two years ago. And I thought to myself, well, with all the technology that's out there, why can't I capture that easily? And the answer was no. You could do it if you were tech savvy enough to know about four different programs and also spend a lot of time tracking the people down, talking to all of them and gathering all the information. And the technology was already out there. So there's nothing cutting edge technologically about Voice Thread at all. The only thing that's cutting edge about it is what we've tried to remove from the process. It's a process of removal, getting all of the hurdles and impediments out of the way so that you can do this basic human thing that everybody loves to do. And so it's really just removal, getting things out of the way and keeping your eye on exactly what it is that causes people joy and what they enjoy doing, which is sharing simply and easily and sort of trying to get the technology out of the way. And by the way, we're so not done. We feel like we've got -- we're going to be at that same task that we started at. We're constantly dissatisfied and say, no, there's too much in the way there for participation. And so we're just going to keep working at it. But the basic idea was to capture that simple joy that everybody has of talking about shared media, just the people on the couch where you all have a different perspective. And the joy when you hear another perspective, when I start talking about a family picture and then my sister butts in it and says, no, you have that completely wrong. That's not how it happened that day. That's something all people enjoy. And so the idea -- If no one has seen the picture that we're talking about, it's in the -- what is a voice thread anyway? And it's Steve's family photo. I wonder if we can Skype over the link because it is, frankly, one of the -- It's the black and white of a very strange-looking family. And I'm the baby, the sad-looking baby in it. But half the people are either very sad or look sort of insane. So it's just one of those -- Pictures that cries out for what was happening. And you know what? We don't mean to go off on a tangent and you'll rain the sand if we are. But frankly, when it was going from simply an idea to something tangible, and we would speculate as to where our traction would come from, in what markets could this be used? And clearly it's a broad-based application. There are frankly a few markets where it can't be used. But we didn't really see the education market as powerful as it has become. The embracing of voice thread was frankly a very pleasant surprise for us. So you didn't invent this for teachers? No. You did not. No. And it sort of -- it dovetails into our approach right now, which is that we've given away these educator accounts that are basically a voice-read pro account for free to educators and you all may think it's free. But it's actually not. And it's this idea that we can't do it alone. We can't do all of this research. I mean, the article that you sent me, Susan, that Joyce's article on blogging research projects, when I read that, I just -- I mean, I'm taking it back because it's the type of nuanced detailed look at why a voice thread is a good participatory vehicle for doing exactly what she's talking about. But because I don't have the experience or the knowledge, I could never have written that. I could never have done all of that. So I feel like we're the ones getting the good bargain here when we give this away for free. Because the -- all of the research and the teachers teaching teachers thing, it's -- we can't -- we're so busy day to day just working on the project and trying to get the bugs right and developing all these features. We can't do the teaching. So in a way, we've sort of -- we've got ourselves an army. Well, we can't do the technology. Right. It's a good trade. Yeah, and I feel like that's what the Web 2.0 ethic is sort of all about, is harnessing these synergies where that's a perfect blend. See, the way a giant company would have done it is if you're Blackboard, well, you just hire 20 expert technology educators. And then you try to get them to talk with your technology developers and build something like that. But there's something lost because of this -- in a giant bureaucracy. So we feel like there's a great opportunity here where we're just going to stick with the technology and we're going to listen very closely to the community and hear what they have to say and what they're asking for. And feedback is one of the most important things. It drives our development schedule. I mean, each one of those feedbacks that come in, we say, "Okay, that was three in this last week that had to do with having difficulty with audio behind firewalls." So that, you know, bumps up some issue that we're going to develop, you know, some solution that we're going to develop to make that better. So we listen really closely to that. And so it really is this -- it's this great, you know, collaboration between us and our users. I had -- and others should jump in with questions as well when you have them. One other kind of historical question here to ask is, "When did you realize that educators would be interested in what you're -- we're developing and how did that happen?" I think actually educators were the pioneers as it relates to our initial -- Yeah, they found us. -- catching on. They really found us. So we have done very little in the way of marketing or promoting VoiceThread. Frankly, teachers and educators really have done that job better than we could ever have. So, again, it was right from the get-go, I think, that we started to see that there was this undercurrent of educators that were bringing this into the classroom. And really that there was a need for -- you know, again, we didn't see it, that there was a need for something like this. And now that it's there before us, it's plain to see this ability like from the youth wiki, this ability for classrooms to communicate with one another from different geographical locations, different countries all across the world. Time constraints are no longer an issue because it's asynchronous. The language thing, I mean, that would never have dawned on us. We're so focused on what we're doing, frankly, that we would have missed the forest from the trees, so to speak. So it's really great that -- I think it was the first week and it was teachers that were on. And it's funny because we may have had a number of users, but it was the teachers who by their comments and by their uses made it clear to us that they got it. Like, they weren't experimenting. I mean, they were experimenting, but they actually understood the whole vehicle and the whole concept in a way that, frankly, we have a hard time sometimes in a business meeting with, you know, business people and they shake their heads. They're like, okay, so you're talking so you can record your voice. They don't get it. They don't get it all, but we would read a review by a teacher and go, wow. I mean, I couldn't have written it better. That's basically what we're doing. All right. Let me -- let me go ahead. I would like to jump in here and just ask you for a moment to talk about your idea about the picture as conversation, because that's something that I find myself in my classroom quoting now over and over and really is so connected to, I think, what many of us are trying to do. And if you could just sort of tell that from your own point of view there. Well, I think, you know, was it Kodak who coined that phrase, you know, 20 years ago, that a picture is worth a thousand words? But I really think that the truth of the matter is, and what Steve and I kind of talk about all the time, is something that's evocative to you. And frankly, it doesn't need to just be a picture. It could be a document. It could be a video. It could be anything. And if it's something that means enough for you to want to share it with somebody, then clearly there's got to be a story behind it. And I think that's really, in a nutshell, what VoiceThread kind of delivers is you've got the media, but then rather than having to leave the media and go talk about it in a text-based world, we allow you to have this conversation around the media in a simple but social and frankly secure environment. I think really that's what we are in a nutshell. Joyce, let's get your voice in here. We're welcome again. And Joyce, one of the reasons we invited you was the -- I think Steve, you mentioned it, the blog post about -- Yeah, blog and research projects. Good, yeah. And Joyce, have you thought about that more? That was a blog post in September, I think, right? Yeah, we've been doing it with three out of four of our senior project classes. And those teachers have loved it. They've loved it for several reasons. I think, you know, for me, I've been traveling around. I wanted to be far more involved in commenting on these student blogs than I have been. But they have been doing fine without me. What I really had wanted to see was a lot more comments. But even though the comments have not been as multiple as I wanted them to be, what it's done is it's really made the research process transparent. It's opened it up for interaction. Our teachers next week are going to be exploring and in service. One of the activities we're going to have them do is explore the students' research blogs and interact or intervene. In education, we often talk about zones of intervention, opportunities for knowledge building to be social. And what I see happening with student research, especially online, is that it makes it far more independent and individual, which is a good thing in a way. But in the research also, Carol Kalthow told us about the chaotic nature of the research process. And any of us who have written anything that's taken time and that has some length and depth know that when you start it, you get really excited because it's new and wonderful and you're thrilled by the investigation. And then you get bogged down in evidence that either helps you or distracts you. And then you feel like you're never going to finish it. And what students need is an intervention. And an intervention that can happen while the learner is continuing to be respected by that intervener, or I'm not really sure what the word is. And what blogging allows the students to do is to discuss the process, to be reflective, to talk about what's going right, what I've discovered, what I need to know. And what's interesting about these 17 and 18-year-olds is they don't really know what they need to know. And you don't want to bash them on the head and say, "You didn't see that in New York Times bestseller. It's all about what you're working on." But you want to be able to subtly get in there and make some suggestions. You want to do some cheerleading. You want to do some guiding. And this, to me, seems the right landscape for it. And I can show you, my kids are fine on me showing you. Two out of three of the teachers want their blogs to be public and welcome intervention from outside our school. And a third would prefer at this point to keep them within the school and invite the commenters. But I can paste the template in. Would that be helpful? That would be very helpful. And I think what is interesting about the template is we've not really enforced the concept of, "You need to follow this template." It's merely a suggestion, and the teachers and the learners can come up with their own categories. And the categories kind of create an interesting strategy for assessment in a way that I never really expected. I'm not having a great luck pasting. Let me try that again. And categories that kids would not have thought of were some of the things we came up with because very often students would talk about things that we weren't really sure they understood. And so for these seniors, we came up with a category of operational definitions. And one of the interesting things the kids started doing was they started bringing images in. So if they did a mind map or inspiration or whatever web-based tool they used, they'd save the mind map as a JPEG and then bring in that kind of outline or concept map so that the teacher could actually see what they're thinking was. The thesis development would happen in two or three steps. And they'd have the guidance of the teacher, the librarian, and the mentor. These kids have mentors. And in many cases, we were not there yet in terms of the mentors. Some of the mentors felt comfortable jumping into a blog. And some of the mentors really didn't use computers at all. And that would have been a steep learning curve for them. So-- Yeah, I'd like you to slow down a little bit maybe and explain. How are you working with all of these teachers as the librarian? Do you guys meet at different times? What's the sort of community that you've set up to make all this happen? Is this Paul? Yes. It's my job. I know. It's a good answer. I'm a partner teacher. I'm a librarian. And what I do is I help learners learn and I help teachers teach. And what I do is I develop instruction together with the classroom teacher. I help them achieve their learning goals while I incorporate information, fluency skills into the lesson. So I'm often helping to suggest resources to talk about new learning strategies, to help with assessment, to do some of the assessment on my own, and to guide the learners through the whole process. And one of the things I didn't mention about this is honestly, if the kids do this, this could be a formative assessment. We can look at what they're working on as they work through it. But we find that when they're finished, it actually functions as a summative assessment because the blog is nearly as rich as the final product would be, whether it's a paper or a presentation or whatever else. And most of what they have to do is pretty much paste it all together if it's a formal paper, or they've got their presentation nearly ready. So it's focusing on process. And I don't know that I answered your question, Paul, because it just feels, I guess it feels so natural to me that that's my role in the school community to be a co-teacher. And I think that's what teachers, in this environment, I think that's what teachers need if they're going to take these risks. Don't they need somebody who's going to hold their hand, but to be able to hold hands with somebody as we jump into these new waters. I love the idea that we don't have to do this alone, and that in many cases, I know in Kathie's and Carolyn's as well, where they're working with those teachers as co-teachers. I think it's wonderful, and I think it makes it more exciting for all of us. I think so too. I'll get the echo here. Joyce, do you want to talk a little bit about how you came upon VoiceThread and your experiences with that? And then we'll get back to Ben and Steve as well. Well, one of my co-teachers -- Whatever you've been thinking about. Okay, well, my co-teach -- if my friend, Ken, and I have been, and some of you know Ken, wrote up, we've been just sharing new tools, and then he'll come into school, and we'll say, "That's really cool, but what can we do with it?" So one day Ken came in, and he came in with VoiceThread, and the next day we were just going nuts. I was an American Memory Fellow, and I kept thinking about how we could bring in the rich artifacts from the American Memory Collection. Then another teacher was watching us, and she said, "Wait a minute. We can do the student art -- we're actually planning on moving parts of the student art gallery into VoiceThread." What could be fabulous about that is the artist's statement that could happen around the image, and then if we all do gallery walks of each other's art in VoiceThread, imagine the kinds of comments we could make around student work, student art, student evidence. I think that would be really cool. And before we started talking, the Spanish teacher came in while we were doing this, and this is the way our community works, and she said, "This is exactly what I need for my students to practice speaking Spanish more authentically, and I want them not only to speak the language, I want them to tell a story in the language, and I want the story to be their own personal story. And so we're going to create group stories with VoiceThread starting tomorrow, actually, and we'll have to look at Susan's world language experiences so that we have some models that exist. But it just keeps growing, and I guess the first thing I really did with it was when we took that huge picture of the EduBloggerCon conference at Neck, and I put that up in the hotel lobby because that's the only place I could get a wireless connection. And so if you listen closely, you'll hear the elevator bell and some foreign tourists coming by. But then people from all over the world, from Australia and from the Middle East, started commenting and giving, much like your family picture, which I think is classic. That's the one that gets everybody thinking. But I really did fall in love with your brother with the evil grin, and your mother. Your mother is... gosh, does your mother know how talented she is, and how many people now know her? We can tell her. Hey, Talis, put the link. What's the link for that picture? I want to see that. Sure, you've got to send that over, Steve. You must be the same age as me because I have pictures just like that in the same clothes with my two brothers with their evil grins, and they were always teasing me. That felt like my home picture. So that kind of inspired me. And then I did the database voice thread because I think people needed some advocacy tool to prove to the rest of the world that databases are pretty good, and we shouldn't discount them in a world of free information. But I think, and now that I've been showing it at library conferences, librarians have been putting up their state reading list and doing book talks around the voice thread. Nancy Keen, who is the most famous book talker I know, is beginning to experiment with voice thread to do her book talks that people around the world use. So I don't even know if you know how viral it is. No, we don't specifically. You have, you guys. That's great. Yes, we do. So why don't we keep on that tip a little bit, just people speaking up with how you're using voice thread. Any other ideas? Yes, please. Go ahead. This summer we started with voice thread. This is Cheryl. Sorry, this is Cheryl Oaks for Maine. And we liked it so much that when Alice Barr, who's in the chat room tonight, hi Alice, and Bob Spranklin, I've got our K-12 online presentation ready, we'd wanted to use as many Web 2.0 tools as part of our presentation. And so I'll drag the link into the chat room, but our flat agents of change, the whole explanation for our ming was done in a voice thread with Alice. So it's just an incredible tool that, you know, you're right, it gets the message out without you concentrating on the tool, but the tool is so great that you go back to it and use it to share. That's great. Yeah. So thank you. You're very welcome. I'm telling you, we really -- Thank you. I know. Every time we get feedback and all the praise, we need it, because in a lot of other environments, people, they don't get the concept of what's valuable. They think it's you're adding an audio annotation to an image, and you could do that, frankly, in PowerPoint. And the whole thing of asynchronous group conversation being collated to a single page and done simply and easily, they didn't wake up this morning thinking that was a great thing. Teachers do. Like when they -- there's like the light goes off and you go, "You mean you can do that and you can do it with one tool easily?" You know, Steve, I don't mean to be too cynical here, but it's possible that some people do get it, but they don't want to. You know, they want to hold on to it. Definitely. No, no, that -- You know, one voice kind of thing. Right. Yeah. It's true. It's very true. Yeah. It's very true. Listen, we're not saying that we're for everybody. But I think what we've done to this point, and obviously what we're going to continue to do and hopefully do it better, is we're going to do a very simple, easy-to-use tool with really, frankly, leaving the bling out of it that has a use. Now, that use is going to be for the people who want. It's clearly not for everyone. Different for everybody. Right. We talk about it now as the -- we want to be the number two pencil of Web collaboration. Like, it's -- you can -- it's approachable and simple. You can take that little pencil and you can put it in the hand of a three-year-old, and they'll draw something. But at the same time, it's that same pencil in a handle of -- in a hands of a more skilled user is capable of tremendous complexity. But it's the same tool. But the approachability is key. One of the reasons why a pencil is successful is because you do pick it up as a child. And so you're using it and it becomes second nature. It's part of you as you get older. So that's sort of our goal. We get a lot of a million requests for complexity. You know, I want to be able to do this, whatever that. But each one of those things gets weighed against the burden on all of the other people who never wanted that, weren't interested in that. And there's so many tools available. If you're very tech-savvy and you don't mind using five tools, you can do a lot of things that are more complex than voice thread. But you need to know what you're doing. They'll take longer and need multiple pieces of software. And they're not approachable to the people that you invite. One of our -- one of the great joy we would get is when you can send it out to the Web proverbial grandma. And we've actually had a wee bit of success with that. And that's really -- the sort of thing that we're proudest of is that you can send this thing to somebody in invitation. They click the link. The thing opens up. They can leave a comment immediately. That's -- we just want to do that same thing. And we just want to do it better and better and better. And you know, if I can -- I'm just going to chime in. There's something Steve touched on for a minute. And I just wanted to make the point, which is we talk often in our meetings about layered complexity. And it really is -- frankly, it's our motto. And that is that on the surface, it's exactly what it is. You look at it and you say, "Oh, I can record a voice comment right here." And that's fine. You can do it in text. You can, you know, you can use your voice. But as you become a bit more comfortable with the tool and you play around a little bit with the identities, or you look at the doodler, you'll actually realize that voice thread is capable of a lot more than simply making a voice comment. There's a tremendous amount of complexity to the tool that may escape 90% of our users. And that's okay with us. We want the 100% to use it. And if that 10% goes on to use every feature that we have, then that's fine. But teachers have embraced the identities, this ability to, under one master account, be able to create basically an entire classroom worth of people who can comment. You know, that type of security is not easy. And frankly, I've not seen it in a lot of tools that are out there. So I think that's something very important for us. I wonder -- this is Paul again. I wanted to bring up, as I was looking at Joyce's voice thread quite long, but really worth it, Joyce, I think, about library databases. Database one is great. I was thinking that how is this different than a slideshow, for example, or that can be online, or maybe a screen capture program for something? That's a great question because that's like basically our marketing question. That's a nice slideshow you've got there. And this is the bad side about being approachable and simple, is that we look like a slideshow. We could have added 50 different buttons on top of everything to make it clear that this was very sophisticated. But to service approachability, we said, "No, let's keep all of that hidden, and that our more sophisticated users will find it and learn how to use it." But the tool itself should be as simple as a slideshow. It's simply a slideshow that asks a question, which is, "Do you have something to say about this?" If the answer is no, it remains a slideshow for you. But it's that opportunity that you can offer to groups that can be either secure or halfway secure, or any sort of secure that you want. But that ability to broadcast a presentation or whatever it is, it doesn't matter. But to broadcast it as an invitation for participation, that's really different. And that's really very different than a PowerPoint presentation, which is about all your thinking. And instead, this is your opening up, you're asking a question. So yeah, that feels dramatically different to me. That brings up, though, an issue that we have, and we could use some advice on this, which is how to overcome the PowerPoint concept. Because now when people look at things, there's an assumption that they're not being asked to participate. And the option for us is, do we put up big blinking lights that say, "Yes, you can actually participate. We want your opinion." We haven't done that, so a lot of times people will, even with the invitation right there, misunderstand a product and think they actually are looking at a slideshow. So what I always tell people personally is that make sure that you make clear your intentions, because people will perceive this as your personal creative product. If you don't tell them how to interact with it, well, they'll assume that it's a PowerPoint presentation. So if you want participation, say how and when and what you're looking for and say it soon. It should be your first comment on a voice read that you're looking for participation on. Tell people, "This is about this, and I'd really like you to give me all of your input, maybe not on all of the pages in the middle, but I've set aside a page at the end where we're going to discuss all of the ideas." Tell people. Yeah, you know, I'm going to say that, and I'd love to hear other people's response to that too, because I think we, you know, at Youth Voices and at the Personal Learning Space, getting kids to put up a blog post is one thing. Getting them to understand that they're part of a conversation and what it means to put up a piece of writing that is part of an inquiry that you want to invite other people to participate in is really what we're all about, I think, in a large way. So I think we deal with that question all the time. Any thoughts about that? Anybody else? Well, I'll throw out a question here. Today, my students actually went into groups of twos over a shared question as a result of their original 20 questions. So they chose three questions that were discussable, and that you sincerely would be interested in learning more about. And we started to look at Google Reader and ways to find what other people are saying and wondering and learning about the same topic or similar topic and how that might change the way you think about it. One of the things that we were thinking of doing next would be some graphic organizers to kind of think through what you know about it. We could do some free writing too. There's a place for voice thread in here at this early stage of research. Joyce, did you use that at all? Or maybe someone else has some thoughts about connecting voice thread to think through the beginning of your question. What do you mean, this is -- do you want -- Well, so two people have a question, and they have five texts to the question to give the question context. And now they're going to start to see what other people are saying about the question. And maybe this is really what you wrote last year, Paul, about how to integrate an image. So maybe we could think of voice thread as taking those same steps that you had already written about, and you could tell us, remind us about those, and then think about where that goes when it becomes a voice thread, which is kind of interesting. I'm not exactly sure what you're referring to, but let me go back to -- The grid. I know, but -- But maybe I'm on it. But, you know, it's been a writing teacher's favorite thing to do ever since, you know, the second grade teachers do it. You know, you bring in a picture and have all the kids write about what does -- You don't describe the picture, but you describe your response to the picture, right? And you get all this kind of rich writing around the image. So that's something that writing teachers have done for a long time. Students think about searching for images on Flickr, for example, or other places, but where they can find Creative Commons images. When they've already started a piece of research about something, kind of mini-research, they've done some writing, then they find the image, and then they allow that image to take them to kind of the next level of their thing. Yeah, I mean, using VoiceThread that way would be a really cool thing to start doing. Let me ask a question if I could. This is Ben. Obviously, we're speaking mostly with educators tonight. How are the students enjoying the application? Is there a reluctance for them to hear their own voice? Are they shy initially when they're given, you know, a microphone or a headset? Is there apprehension involved? I would imagine there's got to be a bit. But do they, after once or twice, do they start saying, "Oh, it's great. Let's make another," or are they, "Oh, no, not VoiceThread again?" I could chime in on that. This is Lee, and I'm teaching eighth grade computer tech, computer literacy. I have 130 kids, and I'm introducing them all to this. I was waiting to chime in a little bit about the student participation. I want to say that the one thing I'm noticing with the kids is, initially, it's very helpful that I'm able to sign in as the teacher and that they can create their identities under me. So I have a sort of universal username/password situation, and it makes it a fairly rapid process. I want to send students and to want to become an expert and then show everybody else. So I have this one guy, you know, Tyler, and he's like, everybody sends everyone to Tyler to get their identity. So can they upload pictures for their identity? So it's all me, me, me, and then they get in there, and they're like, "Well, what's this all about?" And I'm like, "Well, push the arrow and see." So it plays through, and they hear Paul's kids talking, and you can see them just puzzled, and they're frowning, going, "What is this thing?" And they get to the end of it, and finally, you know, it doesn't take long to figure it out, but I'm like, "Okay, now you need to contribute." And I show them how to record, and they'll do a quick sample record, and then there's an erase it, erase it, and they get all very self-conscious about, I don't know if I want my voice on there, but what I find fascinating is that they immediately try to break it. So what I do, I see them scribbling, and they're trying out all the buttons and trying everything they can find. So they're really great because they're making themselves learn the tool inside out, and as they start to do that and show other students, I think that they'll start to feel more brave about hearing their own voice on the slideshow. I think some other students on there helps, and I think familiarity and time will take care of that part, but it's very cool because it's putting them into a whole, I mean, they really have to think hard as to what this thing is. It's different, and it's very interactive, and it's immediately satisfying, and they love to share it with each other. So I'm not sure where we're going to end up with it, but we're going to be using it a lot, and I'm going to definitely have a lot more to say about it as they start to progress through this thing. One of the things, I do have a quick technical question, and that's it. I have tried to also use it as a way to, I did a big presentation for my county on claymation, and I was really trying to share this complex type of PowerPoint situation where I was showing slides, and then I have these how-to videos. And I'm breaking every single online video editing tool, video publishing tool. I use my own encoders to do flash encoding, but it's broken right now, so it's like I'm desperately trying to get my material to this whole bunch of people that want to do claymation. Is there a chance that uploading little videos along with slideshows and be sort of the bells and whistles, is that going to be coming along as part of the voice through the whole thing? You can upload video now. Okay. But on this point. Because you're a very savvy user, so you are actually going to be way ahead of the curve, which is that if you upload flash video natively, like you compress it yourself, then it's of a much higher quality. Right now we're having an issue with quality because usually by the time it's uploaded to us, it's already been converted at least once. So video suffers tremendously each time it's converted. And so if you can convert it yourself to flash video and then upload it, it's actually very good quality. Right, the quality is excellent. Our problem is we're getting third and fourth generation conversions that get put up and we're shaking our heads, and there's not much that we can do about it, unfortunately. Right. Well, here's just one more question. I won't hog the mic beyond this next technical question. One of the really quick and easy ways for me to make like an instant flash video, of course, is Jeng. Yeah. From the Jeng project. So if I take that, it gives me a single flash file, which is easily uploadable to something. One of the problems I've had is the reason I'm having trouble getting my video and my PowerPoint to all work together is that somehow in that conversion, something's going on in the back end. So that when I end up going from that into making a movie out of a PowerPoint, my videos that I'm making from the Jeng flash aren't working. So things aren't playing nicely together. So, you know, I'm wondering, you know, I love Jeng, but at the same time, is there something else that's some things are not acting in a way that's compatible. So I'll be curious to see what your advice is here. Okay, it's so complicated that I won't, I don't want to hog up an hour talking about it. It's terribly difficult. It's a problem. There are some paid services out there that have solved this problem. The problem is that if we use them, then we then have to pass the costs on and they're not cheap. They'll be like literally 40 cents per video. So, you know, you start adding that up and that gets very expensive. So what we're looking at on the horizon is Flash has Adobe who owns Flash is about to release sometime in the next month, the new version of Flash that has a video codec in it that's very high quality and it also happens to be already part of QuickTime. It's called the H.264 codec and it's about twice the quality of the video that's available now in Flash video and it's something that a lot of programs can output to. If it's, if you can output to QuickTime, then you can output to it. So we're looking to that as sort of we're hoping that this is going to solve a big chunk of our problems. Yeah, it will. I think it will because that's been the one stable force in conversion that I found is through that source. But I think coming from the Jing platform and trying to manipulate around with other things is, you know, I just had a lot of trouble. So thanks for getting technical for me. You're welcome. But the point was that that rich media is a very exciting thing that we can look forward to doing with our kids because our kids are really interested in putting their little PowerPoint movies up and their question was, hey, can we use this to share those little movies? So thank you. You definitely can. So let me pull this back to a question from a little while ago, which I'm fascinated by, which is, you know, I mean, Lee, even as you were talking there, I was noticing that what you're talking about is wanting to make a really cool, you know, presentation to other people and you're doing that at a conference and stuff like that. And we can all do that. And I think this is a great tool to do that with. But as Steve and Ben have suggested, they also want to see this tool as a, I don't know what to call it, a more open social tool. And that's what I've always been struggling with around blogging, too. So the kids aren't just publishing these really beautiful pieces. I mean, and as beautiful as they are, but they're also thinking about how to include this audience in their dialogue, right? How to leave spaces really in their products for that. So I'm wondering if we can kind of look at that question a little bit more. Sure. Do you know what Peggy actually, I'm just looking at the message center, the chat room. Peggy had just asked a question and I think I should answer it, which is about our exporting, the ability to eventually download and save a voice thread. I know it's been one of the most requested features that we don't have. I think we've received more feedback about how do I save a voice thread than anything else. And frankly, we've been working on this problem for the last three months. The issue has always been the doodler saving the animations and how we would do that. And I think we've come up with something and Steve and I are fairly comfortable that within the next few weeks we will have a working version of an export feature for voice thread. So I would probably say we're two weeks away from being able to do that. That's pretty exciting. Yes. It was a very difficult problem because of the animations. It's one thing to just play back somebody's recording, but actually capture their drawings and animations. It's just a very technically difficult problem, but it's a really important one. It's one of those things that gets passed a lot of people who review our product, because it hasn't been done yet. I keep waiting for somebody to copy us because it should be copied, which is the idea that annotations, when you present them all at once, like have you ever received a Word document that has 15 people that have already annotated it? It's barely understandable. And it's simply because you're seeing the sum total of a giant asynchronous conversation at once. And I'm not saying that there isn't a place for that, but there's also a place for seeing the individual voices. And that's what we'll try to do is capture both at once. Yes, the group is present on the page, but when Ben is there commenting and he's drawing, it's his voice, it's his thoughts, and it's unadulterated. It plays back in real time. It's sort of like a ghost writer. I feel like I'm standing next to him. And we didn't want to leave that out of the export option. We wanted to keep that in, and that's why it's taken so long. That sounds good. Susan, maybe we could get you to speak up a little bit about the Spanish projects you're working on. I saw you earlier talk about some art projects that you were hoping to hook up with. I will, but we have a rowdy chat room, and you know everyone wants to ask about tagging. No, I think we should. I think we for a moment, I think we should just ask that question and talk about tagging. Because you've been teaching us the importance of tagging. So the question is what? I haven't been following the chat room. We don't have tagging. It's getting silly. It is on our schedule. We're definitely going to do it. Tagging is so important. It's like we understand it, but something that informs almost everything that we've done from the beginning is you do something different when you're dissatisfied with the status quo. And so that's sort of the voice thread way. When we look at a problem like tagging, we have a love-hate relationship with it. We love it. I mean, we're database lovers, so we have religion on this. We know that it's tremendously powerful. The problem is we feel like in a lot of ways that it's been done, it cuts a lot of people out. Just one example, a tag cloud. We should ask it. Do we like tag clouds? People love tag clouds. Anybody want to answer that? We use an Elg. That's where our youth voices is. And there are tag clouds that we use. And kids, and you can kind of collect. But we don't use them that often. However, teaching kids to tag each of their blogs is really how they find each other. We know that it's critically important, and we're going to do it, and it's going to get done fairly soon. But we want to do it a little differently. Tags are sexy. That's great. That's the best way to do it. What do you mean by tags excluding people? Can you talk about that a little? Because they're not approachable enough, and it really goes back to the term itself, to tag. Which makes a lot of sense once it's been explained to you. But what has bothered me forever about them is the way that there's this assumption. It's like the Insiders Club, that upon seeing tags that you should understand their power and their usefulness. When instead what you really should say every time that you use tags, instead of asking for tags, you should say, "Give me some descriptive words." That's approachable. Descriptive words is approachable. You understand what I'm asking for, and you also understand, you can very easily figure out why I'm asking for them. As opposed to tags, which is a concept. And a concept presented without any context or information is not approachable. So we're definitely going to do tags, and we'll even call them tags. Tags are keywords. We're getting pretty good at teaching it. I can say that. Not everybody, but some of us. Maybe this is related, but what about RSS feeds? We just edited it. It's our first step, which is you can now have an RSS feed of all new commentary on your My Voice page. So it's the sum total of all the threads that you have either made or subscribed to. You'll see it in the upper right hand corner of your My Voice page. There's a link. So if you click that, you can subscribe any way you want. And then you should get notifications of all those. In the future, we're going to add a more granular level, and it will be by thread if you choose. So instead of it's all your My Voice page, you can just actually pick the individual ones. But for now, it's just all new commentary off of your My Voice page. So imagine if I have a group of students who are researching global warming. It would be great. And they're learning how to use a Google Reader to gather news searches, news feeds, and blog posts, and a podcast. And wouldn't that be interesting if they could add to their feed voice threads about global warming that are being made? Yeah, that is very cool. And maybe we just, in New York City, we just had the New York City Library conference this fall. And some people came up from the Library of Congress and talked about the primary sources in the Library of Congress. Imagine if we could build some sort of body of primary source documents that had tags, and you could put a feed to those so you could incorporate them into your work. That would be interesting. Yeah, we're really excited by that possibility. And we're really excited going forward because of so many of these opportunities, because, you know, I don't know if any of you have heard, but the whole, I think it's being called open social framework that's being put together. Google is leading it. Google is right. It's basically finally an open framework for social activity on the web. And we're excited by this because this is the way, this is what Web 2.0 is all about. It's an even playing field, and it's open to everyone. And it's all about easily moving information, data, and interactivity across barriers. And it's been a very difficult thing up until now because you have these five dumps like MySpace and Facebook, and everybody is closed off to everybody else and very insular and protective of what they've got. And it, you know -- That's right. That's not very Web 2.0. It's not. And it's been moving, but slowly in this direction, and we think that this is really going to open it up. And it's all about taking source material wherever it's from. And source material can be a really broad category, but moving it and using it in as many places and as easily as possible. So the idea that now it's sort of -- well, it's not revolutionary, but it's admit a big deal that companies like Flickr or Facebook allows us to go in and take users' images so that those users can utilize us. That's been kind of revolutionary, but it shouldn't be revolutionary. That should be the way things are, whether it's the Library of Congress or your pictures on Facebook. It doesn't really matter. You should be able to take that information and do with it what you want. And that's what we're sort of concentrating on in the long term, which is that we want to be able to set up simple, really simple social spaces to talk about anything. It doesn't matter. I know we're getting near the -- oh, I'm sorry, Steve. I know we're getting near the end. I did want to just reiterate one thing, which is the tag thing, because I know we are going to be implementing it, and I just want to get everybody's feedback before we all sign off. Everybody is very pro-tag, I'm assuming. I mean, I think we've learned -- we -- I hate to speak for we -- but those of us who are using youth voices and Elgin and so forth, we've learned to teach students how to find each other through tags. And not only that, the K-12 online conference, all of that stuff is tagged. And so the educators in the blogosphere, I think, are really kind of -- Pushing people. We understand how to use it. Yeah, right. Okay, and you're finding that students understand how to use it as well. Yeah, you know, because you know what? You know, finding the main idea theme, you know -- That's drilled into them since first grade. That's true. I think not only do the students understand tags pretty quickly, but they really seem to be able to use tags to put a question in context, and that's what we talk about a lot. That's great. Okay, then you know what? That makes it easy for us. You know, a rainbow could have tags that say color, art, or a rainbow could have a tag that says molecules, science. Right. And it really helps you try to figure out what you're thinking about. And I think that would connect us more to primary documents and images, too. Right, right. And I might add, too, Susan, that we have made a commitment to our group. It's very hard to keep all the teachers and students together in our two Elgs. That everything we do will be tagged with the youth voices. When it comes to things like our voice thread, or in other words, our tagzanium app, it's a way for us to find that without having to share the link, you know, so we can always tag that and find that information when we're in all parts of the world. Right. That's great. And you know what? That's fantastic, because, you know, that's going to become very useful on voice thread very soon, because once we do put in the tagging, we've also got one other feature that I think -- coming up that I think everybody's going to really like, which is -- we've gotten a lot of technical questions about how many threads you can add to a page. Everybody is becoming aware of this embed overload, where you put in 5, 10, 15 embedded flash items on a page, and suddenly it takes 30 seconds to load, or 45 seconds to load. So what we're going to do is offer a single -- what we're calling a library, SWIF, which is a flash library. It's a single embed that you would put on your page, but it would contain a collection of voice threads -- All of your voice threads. -- that you could access. So rather than loading 15, well, you could load 50, but they would all be just small thumbnails. And actually, if you want to see it, you can -- basically, it's going to look exactly like our browse page looks. So in other words, you can make it as small as you want, but you would navigate through it with what we call that little page scroller. You would get your own sort of browse page. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. But it would be all contained on your one block. And so you could have 50 or 100 voice threads. However many you made, basically, you could embed them all into that. And if they've been tagged, you'll be able to create them around tags. So -- Perry forces -- -- could sort of automatically -- you tag it in your voices, it automatically gets added to that collection, to that library. Joyce, can we come back to you for kind of final thoughts, and then we'll come around and hear anybody else who'd like to have a final -- Yeah, I think we're really -- I feel like we're at the tipping point of all of these new tools. We're discovering them, and as we talk in the chat room, my mind is overflowing with the ways we fly this. You know, I was an American Memory Fellow, and there was -- one of the things in our training was to take these images and have these rich discussions, these analyses, and everybody brings -- just like your family photo, everybody brings a different context to that. Imagine posting a photograph so that we can globally share opinions. Imagine even putting up one word that might prompt a debate across classrooms, across countries. Imagine putting up original art so that we can have critiques across classrooms. Imagine children telling stories. Imagine really using this to develop a storyteller's voice. I can think of so many educational applications. First, we're playing around in a sandbox with these things, and as we work together on these things, we are really developing curriculum and figuring out how this works with learners of all types. We're talking about learners with IEPs. We're talking about gifted learners. We're talking about learners in all sorts of different languages. Can you imagine a voice thread that's filled with so many different languages and perhaps some subtitles to help us? I can really see this. I can teach the world to sing. I'm not -- Asynchronously. And in a crazy kind of harmony that's asynchronous. But I really think that we were talking about group hugs or feeling the love, but I think, Stephen, that you need to know how much we appreciate your work. Thank you so much. It's really taking off with the educational community, and we will keep sharing with you how we sing this. The feedback -- we can't tell you how the feedback really has driven our short, medium, and long-term goals based on what we're hearing from you all. So it's really been a two-way street. It's been fantastic. And hopefully it'll just continue to get better and better. So we're planning a voice thread on 50 ways to use voice thread. That's awesome. And everybody in the chat room promised to work on it together. That's great. I love it. I love it. Thank you guys. I do have a couple of other questions. I'm going to ask them fast. What about copyright issues? Do you guys deal with that? Oh, it's a constant nightmare. I will say this, though. One of the good things about being small is we basically look to Flickr and YouTube and everybody else for figuring out the issue. And they're very -- they're actually remarkably kind in their ability or their -- Openness. Their openness, exactly, to share documentation with small startups and stuff like that. So the verbiage, the language that they use is basically where we take our cue from. And it is such a -- you guys must deal with it on a daily basis. Well, we should -- yes, go ahead. It gives us an opportunity to -- let's put it that way. I don't know if teachers do it enough, but yeah, it absolutely gives us another opportunity to talk to kids about creative commons and what images and stuff they're using. My five-year-old asks me questions all the time about what's appropriate, which is pretty funny to have a five-year-old asking you, "Can I put -- he wants to scan pictures of Pokemon cards and put them up there." And he asked me, "Is that okay?" And it's -- you know, I don't even know if it's okay. It's a very complicated question, but it's just very funny. It's so telling of his generation that, you know, when I was five, I wasn't asking about copyright issues. And the other -- and I don't know. We're starting another show here, and we've got to end this one. But the other question I had was if you had any considerations of synchronous kind of communication around an image. Yeah, we absolutely do. But we just need to make sure that in -- we don't want to break what we've done. So our question always is, it's wonderful. Can we add it with -- and remain simple on the surface? If we can add it in a way that a pro user or an educator can click a button that says "Go live" and then be in a live conversation, yes. Then we want to do it. But we don't mind being last to a party. So for instance, you can look at Adobe Connect, WebEx. There are so many people doing that. We just want to make sure that once we get there that we're doing it right. That's right. We've used them all, and we think they're all bad. Because the only reason why they're around is because it's such a deep need that people are willing to pay money for software that works about half the time. But we don't want to join that and say, "Oh, yes, we're also going to do one of those people." Steve, I'm sorry to interrupt, but one last thing, because I know we're over. We also have one other thing that's coming out, which we think is actually pretty revolutionary. And that is we will have a call me feature. So instead of having a -- being microphone based, you'll be able to call in using a telephone. Actually, it's a very cool service. Steve can speak to it better than I, because it's a bit technical. But there'll be no codes to dial, nothing. It's going to be a very -- I think it's going to be great, but I'm not sure if it's going to be optional, because it's not going to -- it's going to have a cost associated with it, because it's got a cost to us. So I'm not sure if it's going to be that useful in the classroom setting. It's more in the setting where you want to send a voice-read to somebody, and you want their feedback, but you don't know about their technical ability. Do they have a microphone? Do they not? So the ability to have a telephone button where you click and you enter your phone number, we call you, and simply say, "What do you have to say about this in front of you?" And then record it with no key presses on your phone. That's been -- it's a big thing for us, but I don't know if it's -- you know, the classroom may not be the appropriate place for it, but we do think it's going to be a big feature, because that's something that we hear from a lot of corporate and enterprise, you know, large institutions. About universal access is that they perceive the microphone recording on the personal computer as not being universally accessible, and it's a legitimate criticism. You do need -- it's not for everybody, because there's software that needs to be, you know, your system preferences and control panels. I don't know, Steve, I'm looking at the chat room, and I think the educators are digging the idea that we're going to have to call the teacher. I got to tell you. But you know what, I mean, I can flip that a little bit, because one of the things that I think is neat about VoiceThread is to show somebody, isn't this really cool? And then, you know what, now you need to get your computers ready to be able to do this, right? That's right, that's part of the idea. You've got to figure out how sound works on your computer. That's right. Right, though, that's true. Yeah. I mean, at least in schools, we can kind of flip it in that direction. Right. Again, we really need to get -- you know, I want to make a final comment, and then Susan, I want you to -- Susan or Lee, you can get in here. And that is that I've been impressed tonight. One of the things that I've been following the thread here that I'm really interested in is how we talk a lot about creating compelling communication, and that's -- I think people see VoiceThread as that. And I would -- I think we also need to think about teaching young people how to read this stuff, right? How to be a participant on a VoiceThread needs to be as taught as much as how to create it. So that's one of the things -- That's an excellent, excellent point. Yes. And -- We've got a lot of work ahead of us. We have to -- we'll get Woody to listen to this, and then we'll have to have this conversation again when Woody's around, because I think what Woody did with his students in Alaska just really launched our thinking about this project. In such big ways, you know, Woody had expressed to me that he thought maybe -- and his students thought maybe that the students in other places, New York other places, might think that it wasn't worth talking to these students in Alaska or that it wasn't cool. And my students saw those VoiceThreads up in the stories about their experiences on the Yukon River, and they said, "Oh, my gosh, when can we meet these students? We'd like to go there. We'd like to see this." And it just became so compelling to them. So to have this kind of compelling communication and really be thinking about it, to see these students who live in a place in Alaska where there are literally no roads, and my students who live in the middle of Manhattan always -- and their comments to each other with, "Thank you so much for sharing this," that that is just becoming the way they communicate. Yeah. You know, and I've been accused of being utopian, but maybe VoiceThread in a way will really change the way we talk to each other if we can learn how to do this. Right. I think you're 100 percent. We have a couple of hurdles to overcome, and that is that there's a reluctance for people to hear their own voice at times, and certainly for kids and children, it's difficult to overcome that. You have to be cool. And yet, you know, this sometimes hearing your voice is not the coolest thing in the world. But I will say this, that we've had classrooms in Israel communicating with classrooms in Florida, and once it gets going, it really is a great opportunity for us to learn how to communicate. And I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. 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I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. I think that's what I'm going to say. Thank you, Steve, and Ben, and Joyce, and everybody else for joining us tonight. I think we're going to say good night with that. Great. Thank you guys very much. Good night. Good night. [BLANK_AUDIO]