This is a compilation of best practices related to creating and sharing VoiceThreads. Much of the information below has come directly from instructors and students that have used VT in their courses.
Be sure to name your thread and while you are at it give it a description.
Remember that you can reorganize your slides at any time by dragging and dropping them on the edit page.
When adding slides to your presentation, if you drag individual slides, photographs videos etc.. all at once using the multiple select option of your operating system, VT may not get the order correct and you will have to rearrange the order. If you are dragging over individual slides, usually photos of some kind, drag them one at a time in the order that you want them to appear, otherwise you will need to use the drag and drop interface on the edit page to order them correctly.
Remember to add a title to key slides. You can add a title by mousing over a slide in edit mode and clicking on the small pencil icon that appears at the bottom of the slide. If you are in comment mode you can right click on a slide and choose "Edit this slide" or use Control click on your Mac for the same effect.
If you want to add a slide to a picture or a video from a different web site, you must have the direct url to the media file. This means the url needs to list the file type after the file name in the link, like a url that contains a link to filename.jpg or movie.mp4.
Remember that when you upload a PowerPoint file, slide transitions, animations and slides that introduce bullets one at a time will be a static image. If you want it to appear that you are adding bullet points or building parts of a graphic, each step will have to be a separate slide. The other option is to record your presentation as a video file and then upload that file to a VT slide. You can have a video on each slide if you like.
VT has the ability to link to a single url from any slide. To access this functionality, click the edit pencil when you mouse over a slide in edit mode. From the popup window, put your url into the "Links To" box.
Replace a slide. In edit mode, click on the edit pencil when mousing over a slide. In the popup you will find a "Replace" link at the top of the slide image. Click on this link and the file picker for your operating system will appear. Select a new image, or file from the list and the slide will be replaced, leaving all of the audio comments. Note: if you are replacing a single PowerPoint slide or page from a pdf document, you must export the single page/slide and save it as a separate file.
Rotate a slide/image. Access the edit popup for the slide and use the small arrows in the top right and left corners.
When using Vt as a presentation tool in an online environment, there are some settings that you will want to use that will make your thread flow a bit better.
Go into edit mode for your thread
Find and click on the gear icon that says "Options" at the top right, just below your username.
From the menu select the "Playback Settings" option
There are a number of settings here but the ones that are most important for lectures are:
Check the "Start Playing when opened" box unless you are embedding multiple threads on a single page.
Check the "Automatically advance to the next slide after x second" box and change this to zero.
Another one that is good to check is the "Allow others to download original media." With this clicked, students can right or control click and download a copy of the original file used to populate the slide. If it was a PowerPoint file it will let them download the entire file from any slide that uses the file. If you uploaded images or videos it will let them download the original file on that slide.
There are a number of ways to comment but the most popular is to use basic audio. This tutorial "How to Comment" describes all comment options.
After recording an audio comment, always let it begin to play back so you can verify that it was recorded before clicking on the "Save" button. On occasion, due to bandwidth or connectivity problems, your recording won't make it to the server and by checking that it plays back you will generally be okay.
If you want your recordings to be more professional and you want to add sound effects or something special, use an audio recorder, like Audacity, to record the files and store them locally on your computer. Once you have your recordings you can just use the "Upload a Comment" option in the comments mode.
If you like, you can change slides in a recording and the audio will span multiple slides. This is not recommended most of the time but used sparingly it can be a good addition to a presentation.
Recording multiple comments on a single slide. You can make as many comments as you like on any slide. This makes it easy to record in small chunks. You will know that there are multiple comments on a slide in two ways; 1) you will see multiple icons in the comment stream on the left side of the thread, often the photos of the users; 2) you will see a number of gray bars on the playback timeline at the bottom of the thread.
Clicking on the gray bars in the playback timeline will select that clip for playback.
Delete a comment: mouse over one of the faces/icons in the left comment stream and click on the trash can icon. A confirmation box will appear asking you if you really want to delete the comment. If so, just click the "Delete" button.
Remember that you can use the doodle tool and write on any slide while making audio or video comments.
Encourage students to leave comments on your threads to engage them in your course. The setting to allow comments is in the share options.
There are a number of ways to share your threads with your course.
The best of these is to use the VoiceThread/Canvas LTI integration. This allows you to easily share your threads with just the members of your course.
The easiest and simplest (but least secure) way to share you threads is to make it public and send out a link.
You can also share threads more securely using the "Secure" tab on the sharing popup window for each VoiceThread.
You can also drag and drop VTs from VoiceThread Home to a group or to Course VoiceThreads.
Wan to view a video file of the VoiceThread that they can download locally to watch? This is easily done using the "Export" feature in VT. To export a thread:
Click on the "Share" link when in edit mode
When the "Share" window pops up, click on the "Export" tab
When you click on the "Export" link you will get a popup with a message that says; "Exporting is not yet available in this version of VoiceThread. To export please click the link below and click the "Export" button at the bottom of the page." Go ahead and click the link and a new tab/window will open with the thread opening in the old version of VT. This step will go away in the next few months as they finish the transition to the new VT interface.
At the bottom of this new screen, find and click the "Export" button.
The next popup window will show you how many export credits you have and at this point just click the export button. We have unlimited export credits so no need to worry about not having enough export credits.
Once you click the "export" button you will get a message telling you that your movie is being exported and you will receive an email when it has been finished.
Click OK.
To see the status of your exports, click on the small down arrow next to your name/picture in the top right corner and select the "My Account" option.
Click on the "Exports" tab on your account page.
If your exports are ready you will see two versions of the file that you can download, a high quality version in .mov format and a mobile version in .mp4 format. The high quality version will be 852x480 pixels and the mobile version will be 320x240 pixels. Click on either of the links to download the appropriate version.
Once you have downloaded the files you can store them in a location that students can access later.
While these tips, tricks, hints and student requests are currently up to date, this page will be updated as things change, something we can count on in the world of technology.