PowerPoint to VoiceThread

[Vicky Sedgwick]

I haven't used VoiceThread much this year. I currently only have a free account and I used to have all of the computers in the lab logged in to the same account using different identities. Since that's not an option anymore I just didn't do much with VoiceThread after the first semester this year. We have done quite a few projects with "voice" but have used PowerPoint to do them and then uploaded the PowerPoint to SlideBoom. I don't have the collaborative aspect with this but many of our projects weren't really collaborative anyway.

We participated in a Monster Exchange project this year and were asked to do reflections on the project with our students. I created a PowerPoint to do this and the students recorded their reflections on a series of 3 slides. I then combined these into one big presentation but I wanted to just take the recording from the first slide for each student and put them all on one slide and let people click on the voice they wanted to hear and then continue through the other slides. I created this in PowerPoint and it worked great but the ability to click on the speakers went away when I uploaded the presentation to SlideBoom which meant you couldn't hear what the students had to say - so that wouldn't work for this.

Aha, I thought, I'll use VoiceThread since I had read you could upload PowerPoints and I hadn't ever tried that. I decided to see if it could handle what I needed. Sadly, it couldn't since I all I ended up with was the images and they all had speakers on them since my students had inserted recorded sound on each slide. So back to the drawing board but I knew there had to be a way to get the images and recorded information from the PowerPoint into VoiceThread so here's what I did:

1. Save the presentation as a web page. This exports all of the sounds files for me.
2. Take all the speakers off the slides and then save the presentation as jpg images. This saves all my slides as individual images.
3. Upload all the images to create a new VoiceThread. It might be a good idea to rename the files before uploading since it names them slide1, slide2, etc. which means slide2 will come after slide 10 and not right after slide 1. I didn't and just reordered them in VoiceThread.
4. Using each of the student identities that I already have under my account, upload the sound files as comments on the slides in VoiceThread. I did change the pictures for each of the student identities to match the Monster Project since this class had not done any other VoiceThread project this year.

Voila! A VoiceThread from a PowerPoint including the recorded information on the PowerPoint.

[Mark Carls]

Vicky,
Thanks for sharing all your thoughts as you worked through this. It looks great.

[ellen pham]

Vicky, this project is ADORABLE! What program did the students use to create their monsters? Did the students exchange monster descriptions with kids outside their own class?

The conversion to voicethread sounds like a lot of work, but it's really nice to have the option for others to comment on the creations. If this isn't important to you, a very easy way to convert PPT to a file that can be embedded in ning (a flash file) and still preserves the voices is ispring. It converts everything in your PPT with just one click, and there is a demo version, I believe.

Hmm, I just looked at the site and they've changed the deal a bit, they've added a free version but it only converts as a movie... the old demo version did not expire, just had an ad for ispring as the last page, and more options... still, worth a look : ).

At any rate, I just love your class project!

[Vicky Sedgwick]

I did use ispring to upload to slideboom - the problem is you lose the ability on the first page to click on each student and hear their reflections. The original PowerPoint had a sound file on each monster and you could click on it to hear that student's reflections. I use ispring & slideboom all the time to preserve voices and animiations, etc. - it just wouldn't do exactly what I wanted in this case which is why I ended up converting to a voicethread. And, as you said, it's nice to allow the option for other comments too.

It was multiple steps but not that difficult - exporting from PowerPoint is a single click and then it's just uploading the files. I already had identities established for my students from the beginning of the year. You can see all of the presentations we uploaded from Powerpoint this year - some using the web interface and some using ispring if I had external sound files - at: http://www.slideboom.com/people/StMComputers

Now on to the Monster Project - we used KidPix to create the monsters though you could use TuxPaint or Paint or any drawing program. This was part of of the Monster Project and we exchanged monsters with a class in ND.