People Power

An ongoing question for me continues to be: "What happens when people are given a voice?"

I ask it often of myself about my students in a middle school science classroom. But the power of the internet to allow for easy, free collaboration and networking takes the question to an entirely new level.

This week, NPR's series On the Media interviews Clay Shirky, who has just published a book called Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. The interview was (for me at least) a discussion about the question I have been asking myself.

You can listen to the interview in the player below. You can also go to the On the Media website for a transcript. According to the site, the transcript will be available as of the afternoon of Monday, March 3rd.

An Amazing Tool

I was catching up on Will Richardson's blog and found a posting about Voicethread. I have just spent a few minutes with it and my head is spinning (in a good way).

The idea is this: you can post a photo or photos or other images and then record a voicethread over it. Cool enough. But other users can record voicethreads over the same image, effectively adding a multitude of voices to one images (or one set of images). All the recording (or typing, if you prefer to annotate instead of narrate) happens inside the browser.

My head is spinning imagining the classroom opportunities. You can have a class of students react to a set of images. They can prepare really unique slide shows, ones that are much more interesting than PowerPoint (or its cousins). Here's a great example.


As a science teacher, I am thinking about posting a diagram or graph and have students talk about what it says to them.

More as it happens.