The VoiceThread at Penn State service will be announced University-wide in early August, 2011. During the spring of 2011, we released it as a ‘soft rollout’, meaning that it was communicated to select channels throughout the University and allowed to ‘germinate’ somewhat organically. We did this to see just how much effort it would take our available resources to support VoiceThread at Penn State. It turned out to be very supportable. For example, the total number of Help Desk tickets over 7 months was…8. And 5 of those were for graduate assistants requesting to upgrade their account. Nice.
While we determined that this soft rollout produced some very effective results, we also took note of additional support information we could provide. Our goal has been to develop these materials this summer in anticipation of the full rollout for the fall. This post gives a quick update on where we are.
New Support Material Coming to VoiceThread at Penn State site
As part of our effort to prepare for full rollout announcement, we have been in the process of beefing up the reference material on the VoiceThread at Penn State support website. Among the additional materials being developed that will be available soon:
- Roadmap to Using VoiceThread at Penn State. This is meant to provide instructors interested in using VoiceThread a very basic path by which they can learn about VoiceThread, try it out, see examples, get training and design their own effective VoiceThread assignments. We’ve even included a VoiceThread presentation on this Roadmap that can be digested in less than 5 minutes.
- Best Practices. This section contains the best practices for users of VoiceThread that we have captured to this point in it’s implementation here at Penn State. We obviously intend to append this content on a regular basis in the future.
- Using Groups. This page contains a custom tutorial for Penn State users on the best way to create and populate a group. It’s specific to workflows at the University and includes how to use ANGEL functions to do this. It’s a critical function for instructors.
And Coming Shortly…
We have other materials under development that will also be available shortly after our initial update. These include:
- VoiceThread: Simply Speaking. Being developed in the same style as the “Simply Speaking” series of videos, it explains what a VoiceThread is, it’s uses and it’s availability at Penn State in just two minutes.
- Official VoiceThead ‘Feature Set’ for Penn State. The University’s license with VoiceThread has afforded a more comprehensive offering of VoiceThread features than what is listed on the VoiceThead site itself. This custom version should clear up any confusion that may have been out there.
And After That…VoiceThread Advocates
We are also developing an additional community-based support site that will provide VoiceThread users at Penn State a place to share their stories, thoughts and designs in VoiceThread. The working name for this area will be “VoiceThread Advocates”. We will have more on this later but it is scheduled to be ready in August.
