Reflection on making my first voicethread presentation

It has been a great experience for me to create this voice thread digital story. This is about an introduction on traditional Chinese festivals: the food for the particular festival, the relevant activities that people participate during each festival.

• In the past, when I taught this chapter, I made a PowerPoint slides where the quality visuals and key vocabulary are displayed.
• Now I come to know more media tools from this course. I re-edit this PowerPoint slides by following the principles of Presentation Zen.
• Voice Thread is one of the fantastic media tools I am introduced in this course. It has the following unique features:

1. Still images and video files can be combined;
2. Comments in four ways ( oral-record/telephone, type text, add video clips) on each slide/clip enable the presenter and the audience to interact with each other;
3. Collaboration outside of class, listen to each other's messages and give feedback orally.

• On each of the slide, I introduce the name of the festival, the food and the activities. I particularly emphasize on the pronunciation of the key vocabulary and phrases, repetition of the same sentence patterns in each festival's introduction.
• Students can access to my voice thread slides outside of class, listening to my introduction, commenting on the slides by adding up their own images, videos or recording their opinions, questions and so on..By doing so, I created an online authentic learning environment for my students.
• It is perfect for students to practise their oral skills in target language.