voki.com
I would like to recommend to you voki.com. It is a fun and motivating website where your students, and you as a teacher, creates an avatar (almost like a virtual cutout doll). It is a motivational and creative way of learning.
It can be used in many ways in a school. For example the student make presentations of themselves in the classrooms, with other schools or in a classroom half around the world. Some students, for instance, don´t like to talk in front of others, here they get help from a voki. As a teacher you can use a voki to make a different introduction to a lesson or a project or maybe put on a blog.
The students need computers (with internet connections), microphones and help to register. You
will need an e-mail address and a password to register. Then they create their voki by choosing clothes, hair, voice, backgrounds…
The voice they record directly or include a sound file. The student can also type, and the computer reads it out loud, sometimes this sounds a bit funnyJ. This you can have great discussions about. The recording limit is one minute and you can choose the language that you want.
For teachers, voki.com, have a whole lot of ideas and lesson planning’s for you to get started. As a teacher you need a big portion of patience and please do not try to get at whole class of 20 to get started at the same time, but when you got started and the students starts to get a hang of it, you will get creative young learners!
Anna-Maria Wennberg
Hi Anna-Maria,
ReplyDeleteI have never seen such a website before so I was really excited to read about voki.com. The thing that I like most about it is that the website is easy to use. The instruction, of how to create an avatar, is easy to follow. This is a wedsite where only your imagination sets the limit to what you can create!
One thing that I do not like about the website is that the ads on the sides are quite alike the actual voki.com. The voki.com has a similar design to some of the ads, so it looks a little bit unprofessional. But when/if you decide to join the Voki classroom (for $2.50/month), the ads are not included, which is good. I believe that websites with ads on them has to be used carefully, especially with younger children.
Since I like the whole idea of making an avatar for the students I created an account. I think I might use it to give the students instructions on specific tasks in Swedish and maybe later on, in English. What I'd like to know is how you first started to introduce this to the students? My students are from 1st to 3rd grade (I have a mixed class with 25 students). How big was the group when you introduced Voki?
Sincerely Jenny Engkvist