Successful use of Gabcast and Voicethread in PD workshop

This past week I presented a workshop twice in Portland, Oregon, on "Cell Phone Digital Storytelling.". In the past I have shown workshop participants how to use the websites Gabcast as well as VoiceThread, but these workshops were the first ones where I've focused almost exclusively on those tools. I created a VoiceThread of reflections on the conference in a whole-class format, after teacher-participants used their cell phones during the workshop to record their reflections to the website Gabcast.


I'm interested to know if other teachers have used Gabcast successfully for digital storytelling projects, including VoiceThread? We've had one digital story in our "Celebrate Oklahoma Voices" digital storytelling project use Gabcast for an interview with a grandparent ("The Dirty Thirties") and another which used GCast ("The Story of Richard Ivie"). I'd really like to know about more examples of these types of cell-phone powered digital storytelling projects, as well as about the experiences others have had.

In creating this VoiceThread, I first added the photos. I then downloaded all the participant comments from Gabcast. In all during both workshops, we had 28 different recorded audio reflections. Only one of these was a repeat, as far as I know. The reflections were uploaded on slides one and three of the VoiceThread. The first time I uploaded them, for some reason I was not presented with the VoiceThread trash can icon to delete individual uploads. I deleted the entire slide and started it over again, and the second time the trash can was present as it should have been. That seemed to be a strange bug.

I encouraged teachers to not break the cell phone use policies at their schools: If their schools banned cell phone use at school, they could use this as a homework assignment for students. I think this process of using Gabcast takes quite a few "clicks" for teachers who are brand new to digital storytelling or consider themselves not to be very technology literate, but overall I think the process is relatively straightforward.