Module+4


 * Class:** Intro to Lesbian and Gay Studies
 * Unit:** LGBT History
 * Project:** Students are to join as a group to create a site that explores the experiences of a historic LGBT person (examples include Harvey Milk, Sappho of Lesbos, Alan Turing) and how the life of this person affects the present, using historic images and quotations relevant to the life of their historic figure to construct a narrative. This narrative will take the form of an annotated slideshow in which each group member contributes audio discussing the content of the slides. Students will then comment on the slideshow of two groups other than their own, and the group members will present their responses to these comments in person during a following class session.
 * Tools:** Students construct a slideshow using VoiceThread and embed it on a space provided on the course Moodle page.

Voicethread combines several of the more appealing aspects of live slideshow presentations and webcasts with a key advantage: vocal annotation without a live presence, and without the need for additional recording equipment, since users can simply comment via phone. I suspect it may also be an excellent tool for helping students who have difficulty making live presentations: if they can practice making presentations with recorded audio, it can bolster their confidence and give them a chance to hear how they sound as an audience member might. Students can take the time to re-record their annotations, and the ability to have multiple recorded annotations lets all members of a group contribute, where a live presentation with the same number of members might be more difficult to coordinate. The online nature of Voicethread-- as well as its combination of audio, visual, and textual information --satisfies Ohler's guidelines: it's a media collage (1) that still includes written aspects (2) while also allowing for an artistic aspect (3) in the visual and audio components. Many (if not all) students will have had some experience making presentations using PowerPoint, but the addition of recorded audio and the online format blend these more commonplace skills with emergent ones (4). That the annotations are recorded rather than presented live allows the student user time to think about other ways to discuss than simply repeating or restating a given slide; they can engage the slides more on their own terms and in their own voices, adding their personal take (5 & 6). Ultimately, Voicethread lets students experience a multimedia tool without the need for additional software or hardware, giving students using it an experience in the fast-growing "cloud" model of computing and online media to develop literacy (7) and perhaps, ultimately, fluency (8). None of this is automatic, of course: students should not be simply set loose on a tool such as Voicethread, but given guidelines and guidance by their teachers and teaching assistants- this of course requires that teachers recognize that they are as much learners as their students are, and develop the same fluency in digital media that they wish to engender in their students.