Voki Feature

Purpose: Describe Voki's features, suggest possible implementations
Activity & Discussion: Participate in this post's discussion by making a commitment-free Voki avatar
Goal: Find possible ways to incorporate Voki into your course 

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Background: Some of my colleagues from ESL and TEFL areas, have asked me about letting them know about any techie ways to incorporate technology into their classrooms. I wanted to dedicate this first post to responding to this through introducing a simple and user friendly web 2.0 tool, Voki. This can be a valuable tool for ESL and foreign language teachers, as well as for teachers of literacy.  Teachers can use the basic Voki account in their instruction materials, or upgrade to a classroom account where students can make their own avatars and engage in their own writing, listening, and reading, and speaking. This type of engagement adds a new dimensions to enhancing courses. The features Voki integrates no doubt play an important role in language literacy and provide students with examples of language in action. 

User Friendliness and Features:  Voki is in its basic form a talking avatar. 

• As far as avatar creation goes, you can choose your avatar's look from several sets of features: clothes, accessories, backgrounds, and voices 
• Anyone can create an avatar and share it regardless of having an account set up or not
• Share links through email, direct links, embed code for your site, and social media publishing, and educational platform publishing 
  
• Record your own voice through a microphone, by phone, or choose text-to-speech
  
• Integrated stop, pause, replay, and edit features
• Text-to-speech available in several languages 
  
• Voki Classroom allows the creation and management of content for class accounts ($2.50/month or $29.95 /year)

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Can you add to the following uses? 21stcenturyedtech.com suggests 20 more ways to use Voki in classrooms.
For teachers:

• assigning homework
• differentiating on tests or quizzes
• introducing a new lesson or activity

For students:

• ice breaker activity 
  
• giving a speech 
  
• reviewing/showcasing a novel, important figure, or event 
  
• giving voice to foreign language (and other) presentations
  
• compose music or poetry

Guides to get you started and inspired: 

• Avatar-Making Guide by Jennifer Barnett 
  
• Classroom Getting Started Guide and Classroom User Guide by Voki
• Lesson Plans: Voki provides you with an easily searchable database of lesson plans to use or get inspired by

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Let's talk about it: Let's make this interesting! Take a couple of minutes to create a Voki avatar and reply to this post with your questions or comments! (Remember, you don't even have to sign up to start creating!)

1. What other uses can you think of to apply within your classroom?
2. Have you used it before and what are some of the challenges you encountered?

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