VoiceThread Blog

We have updated our Moodle Embed, Assignment, and Authentication modules for compatibility with Moodle 2.0. The Moodle Embed and Authentication modules are also compatible with 1.9; however, the Assignment module should be chosen that corresponds to the version of Moodle you are running (1.9 or 2.0).

To learn more, please visit our LMS Integration support page.

A common question for new VoiceThread schools, districts, colleges and universities is “How should we do authentication integration”? There are often many options, with their own pluses and minuses.

Let’s start with the easy decision: If you have Shibboleth in production, particularly if you already are federated with inCommon, you should do Shibboleth SSO. It’s a tool built for the purpose, and it offers a very secure platform with a great deal of flexibility. Even if you only have a subscription for part of your organization, Shibboleth is an option as long as membership in that part of your organization is visible as a Shibboleth attribute.

If you do not have Shibboleth, then the question becomes more complex. If you have Moodle and all users have access, Moodle SSO can be a good route, particularly if you want to drive more students and and teachers to use Moodle. For Moodle, the scope of the Moodle instance (school-wide, district-wide, etc) must match the VoiceThread subscription. If Moodle usage isn’t universal and is unlikely to become universal, LDAP (Active Directory, eDirectory, OpenDirectory, rfc2307, etc) is also a good option. Like Moodle and Shibboleth, we support LDAP over a secure transport (SSL), and have a great deal of flexibility on attribute mappings. For LDAP, we can restrict access based on groups or OUs, for subscriptions that don’t encompass the entire organization.

VoiceThread also has a built-in internal authentication system, which you can manage by uploading CSV files containing user data. For many smaller organizations, or organizations without any one central authentication system, this can be an excellent option.

Finally, we have an external authentication system where you can write your own Single-Sign-On tool. This is cross platform (sample code is all in PHP), and provides an option for schools with unusual / non-standard systems that don’t want to do CSV uploads.

Penn State University (PSU) has integrated a customized version of VoiceThread’s communication platform in an effort to provide a seamless collaborative environment for its staff and students. PSU user accounts are automatically authenticated into the platform, providing instant access to VoiceThread.

The integration was developed in close partnership with PSU’s Educational Technology Services group, whose white paper and support portal provide remarkably clear and helpful guidance for new student and faculty users.

• White paper: 7 Things You Need to Know about VoiceThread
• Support portal: http://voicethread.psu.edu/

We would like to sincerely thank PSU’s ETS group for their hard work and high standards, which will ensure an excellent experience for their community of users.

We have made recently made some improvements to our upload process, to accommodate PDF uploads with more than 65,536 individual shapes in a single PDF. This is primarily caused by how PowerPoint renders high complexity backgrounds (i.e. complex patterns instead of a simple color or a bitmap / picture). We still recommend simple backgrounds for the best user experience, especially since extremely complex PDFs can still take 20-30 seconds per page to process.

We have a new twitter feed, twitter.com/voicethreadIT. This is solely for system status information, and we will use this to announce any maintenance or issues that result in user-visible slowdowns or downtime. As always, we have highly redundant infrastructure and strive for zero downtime, but there are occasionally changes needed for long-term stability, performance and growth that result in brief outages or slowdowns.

All of the documentation for our Moodle LMS integration modules is now online. Please go to the LMS Integration About page for more information. Take a look at the embedding, assignment and authentication modules, and see what they can do for your organization!

Please note that we only support Moodle 1.9.x at this time; we do plan to port to Moodle 2.0 once it has been released.

VoiceThread is proud to be featured in Edutopia’s “Back-to-School Guide: Jump Start Learning With New Media” for the 2010-2011 school year (download it here). This is a fantastic guide to learn how to incorporate new media tools into your teaching.

Some wonderful articles have recently been added to the VoiceThread Digital Library that highlight VoiceThread’s effectiveness in various teaching and learning settings. The library is a great resource for educators using VoiceThread. It provides the opportunity to get ideas, share successful VoiceThread projects, and get the most out of VoiceThread as a learning tool!

VoiceThread continues to be used in ways that both impress and inspire us here on the VoiceThread team. We want to thank everyone who has contributed to VoiceThread’s Digital Library and urge anyone else who has a VoiceThread they’d like to contribute, to please do so.

Here are a few of the new articles to the Digital Library:

• Using VoiceThread in an online course from Professor Russ Meade
• Language learners use VoiceThread to practice speaking
• 10th grade Chinese language practice from Lilia Hurteau
• 7th graders practice Math in Action from Ms Redd
• 4th graders study plants in collaboration with Pakistani students

VoiceThread is now a member of the InCommon Federation. This greatly simplifies Shibboleth authentication integration with colleges and universities already members of InCommon, which includes the majority of Research-I Universities in the United States. This should allow for faster deployments for Shibboleth authentication, with much less work on the University / Identity Provider’s end. Thanks to Penn State University for sponsoring our InCommon application.

We are pleased to announce that we are now in open beta with our first Moodle assignment module. This module provides a clean, easy to use student and teacher interfaces for submitting, viewing and grading a VoiceThread. The module is compatible with Moodle 1.9.x and requires either our Embedding or Authentication Moodle modules for configuration support. For the duration of the beta, we only support one Moodle instance with one VoiceThread Manager account.

This module only works with accounts that have VoiceThread Manager (Business Manager, Higher Ed Manager, College, School, District, etc); also, the VoiceThread account must match the scope of the Moodle instance. For example, a departmental subscription cannot use this module with a University-wide Moodle instance. If you would like to join our beta program, please contact us.