I’m always looking for new and exciting tools to use in the classroom. About a month ago I came across a website called voicethread. Now this is one of the coolest things I have seen in… oh, at least a week!

What it does is allow you to upload a picture and then narrate the picture as to what special meaning that picture has. Now, this is not new. However, the really cool part is that you can give others a password for a particular picture and THEY can add their own stories to the picture… get it… voiceTHREAD.

There are two samples on the website that literally almost brought me to tears. One is a picture of a woman in the early 1960’s with five children posing for a passport picture. Something simple right. But you never know what a picture really means until you hear the stories from the people involved. The mother in the picture is now in her 80’s with the kids all grown and with their own children. In the thread, each child commented on what that particular picture meant to them at the time and even today. That picture brought some in that family together who had not been together for years.

Another picture was of a World War II squadron. Some of the remaining survivors were able to tell some pretty amazing stories about some of the heroes in that picture, alive and dead. Pretty cool stuff.

So I am thinking of ways it can be used in the classroom, Lucky for me I didn’t have to think too hard because there is a large section devoted to teachers and ideas of how to use it in the classroom and the good thing is that voicethread promises to always keep in free for teachers and their classrooms.