Ronaldo Lima, Jr., a very talented EFL teacher in Brazil, and my colleague in our growing international Sister Classes Project, wrote a great post in February comparing VoiceThread, Splashcast, and Qlipboard. These are three web applications that, as Ronaldo wrote, “unite pictures and voice in slideshows.”

I’d strongly encourage you to read his comparison of the three sites. I, for one, clearly did not read it very closely.

I say that because I just saw a Splashcast by Sudanese students taught by Hala Fawzi, another participant in the Sister Classes project. It’s a great presentation, and I was surprised to find that you could easily leave audio comments on it. Of course, if I had carefully read Ronaldo’s post from a few months ago, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

I agree with Ronaldo that Splashcast doesn’t seem quite as easy to use as VoiceThread, but it’s nevertheless another viable alternative. One advantage it does have is that you don’t have to be registered with Splashcast in order to leave an audio comment (like you do with VoiceThread). So it’s easier to leave comments. However, it also doesn’t have comment moderation. You can easily delete comments that are left, but you can’t review them before they’re posted.

Ronaldo also wrote about Qlipboard. The last time I had looked at the site, it required a download to use. However, as Ronaldo pointed out, and which I missed, they have since added an online version.

In the online version, you can only use one photo. A major advantage, however, is that you don’t have to register for the site at all. You can just grab the url of an image off the Web, leave a voice commentary (it has a few other features, too), and you get an embed code and a url. Others can leave comments, too, though it doesn’t appear to me to be quite as obvious how to do that as with VoiceThread or Splashcast.

I’ll be posting links to both Splashcast and Qlipboard on Examples of Student Work page. Of course, VoiceThread has been there for quite awhile.