Nearly three years ago I shared a presentation at Loyola Marymont University about my journey through teaching with technology that led me to begin to use VoiceThread, transform my teaching approaches, and, eventually, flip my classroom.  That day, a man named Michael Kieley, whom I had never met, sat in the audience.  Michael did not introduce himself to me that day but did reach out to me afterwards via email to share how my presentation encouraged him to rethink the ways he was teaching his fully on-ground Visual Thinking course. 

We have remained in touch ever since.  And he’s made many spectacular transformations in his class.  We have met a few times in person at conferences and he regularly attends my “Teaching with VoiceThread Hangouts.”

While Michael often credits my presentation as a formative moment in the beginning of his own teaching transformation, I have learned and continue to learn a great deal from him.  That’s one of the things I love most about using social technologies for my own professional development. They allow me to engage in dialogue with educators outside my physical sphere of access. And the more educators are motivated to have dialogues with different people from varied contexts, the more we will shift our frames of reference, ask new questions, and continue to approach teaching as a process of life learning.

Michael wrote to me today. He has been asked to share a 10-minute presentation about VoiceThread with his institution at a faculty development event tomorrow.  To convey the potential of VoiceThread in 10-minutes isn’t a simple task.  His solution was to create a VoiceThread about his journey.  It is shared below. Enjoy.

You may share this VoiceThread using this link: http://voicethread.com/share/4001638/