I enjoyed Miao's and Fred's Voice Thread teaching very much.
I chose Miao's Voice Thread and Fred's Voice Thread because they all selected the topic about abroad study life that allowed me have a lot to say.
For teaching, Voice Thread fulfills several assessment requirements I just learned from assessment class. If I were a language teacher, I will use Voice Thread to assess my students. Firstly, I can assign assignment in the Voice Thread according to what I teach. For instance, if I teach words and phrases about directions, I can ask students to describe a picture of street by using words and phrases they just learned. It fulfills the content validity and give students a chance to practice oral expression ability. Secondly, Voice Thread won't take students a large amount of time to finish. It is very practical. Finally, Voice Thread allows students to hear from and comment on each other and allows teacher to comment on every student. It provides students with great washback. Excepts those rules, Voice Thread also offers a stage for students to play like students and teachers and to show themselves. They can learn from each other via the online communication. And the most important thing I want to mention is maybe Voice Thread provide students who live in remote places with opportunities to communicate with fresh teachers and students. As long as students have computers connected with internet, they can learn in digital classes.
I think that VT is an excellent tool for assessing oral fluency. However, if you were to use VT to test each student's oral proficiency, you would want to make each student give a unique answer. For example you could have many buildings in the picture and tell the students that they have to describe going from one place to another, but that they can't repeat the same directions as someone else. That way each student's answer would be have to be unique, orally correct and visually accurate.
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