As readers of this blog know, I think Voice Thread is a very good web application to produce audio slideshows.  Plus, they’ve been very generous in providing free premium memberships to educators. However, since they don’t allow you to take images directly off the web (you have upload them from your computer), I’ve been on the look-out for any new audio slideshow sites that would have that feature.  It would just make things so much easier….

Mashable wrote today about Show Beyond, a site that offers similar features to Voice Thread plus some additional ones — like being able to directly and easily use images from the Web.  It’s easy to write captions, and easy to record audio.

However, the audio quality is pretty bad, as shown by a quick one slide test I tried.  I had to get the position of my mouth and the volume of my voice just right in order to get the quality you hear on the test.   My first few attempts were inaudible.  There’s no way my students will be able get everything “just right” consistently.  Voice Thread’s audio is much, much better.

It officially began just this weekend, though, so I’m hoping they’re working out technical “kinks.”  If they can get the audio quality for narration better (and I’ve sent them an email asking about it) this site could be excellent for English Language Learners and others.

I won’t place a link to their site on my webpages until they work out the audio problems, and I’ll post about it if and when they do.