Free Tools: enhance your youth work/ministry with Voicethread

Tim Davies’ Blog put me onto Voicethread.com. Its a website that captures the voices that surround shared media.

Voicethread is enabling users to create “voicebooks” much the same way a blogger would create a post or a page on a social networking site. While a blog is mostly written, a voicebook gives the distinct benefit of recorded group conversation. Here is a great example of a voicebook. Another example of an “American Idol” voicebook.

Here are some other possible uses of a voicebook:

• Youth groups can have brainstorming sessions about coming events.
• Churches/youth groups can use it for online teaching.
• MySpace users can enhance their profiles and use voicebooks to leave recorded messages for their friends
• Youth people can communicate with distant parents
• Service men and women deployed abroad can read a bed-time story to their children
• Comments posted to blog entries can evolve into an audio debate

“Voicebooks transform any image into a discussion that can be shared not only over the Web, but over time. Like a Tivo for voice conversations, you can contribute whenever you want,” said Ben Papell, Co-Founder of Voicethread.com. “The conversations are more thoughtful, they can be saved forever, and they’re easily shared.”

You can download the introduction to VoiceThread as a word file here from Tim Davies’ Blog.

Technorati Tags: blogging, Free, Tools, youth ministry, Youth Work/Ministry