Visual Audio Book?

We have started a community book blog for our town. Each month our school has a book of the month. We then have our students read the book then we comment on the blog. We make the books available to anyone in our community that would like to read it and participate.

Our book last month was about WWII and was a little to deep and dark and we felt that it would be better to choose a different book to put on the blog. Since we didn't have the money to buy another set of books for the whole school I decided to make an audio recording of a book to place on the blog.

I am also having my students do their own illustrations for the book, I would like to include this on the website in slide show format flowing along with the audio.

My question for you is what tools would you use to accomplish this? PowerPoint is not an option, I can't assume people outside of our school have a copy.

Tags: help, software

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Permalink Reply by TeachingSagittarian on November 30, 2007 at 8:15pm

Have you looked at http://voicethread.com

You can scan in pictures, add images and add your voices. The beauty of VoiceThreads is that they can be private, or public or available by invitation, viewed on the voicethread website OR you can embed them in most blogs quite easily. The community would be able to leave comments as well and these can be moderated.

We use VoiceThread all the time in our classroom (11-12year olds) plus I've seen it used with 5 year olds in the classroom.

I'd be really interested to see how you get on.

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Permalink Reply by Alice Mercer on December 15, 2007 at 2:03pm

Are you talking about recording a published book or recording your own story?

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Permalink Reply by Nancy Bosch on December 15, 2007 at 3:37pm

Is there a copyright issue on recording a book? You could always use a classic like Swiss Family Robinson, Jungle Book or Count of Monte Cristo...they would all be in the public domain. Many of the classics can be found in audio version, too. Of course, might be too mature for younger readers/listeners.

Since the kids/people blogging would have to have a computer they could read or listen to the classic online. Also, I have a list on one of my websites of online picture books, my favorite is What Did Toby See? Just a thought...N.