Week 4 - Voki

On Moodle some of our ICT introductions have a Voki. These are animated characters that speak (text or recorded voice). I assumed that a PhD in Computing may be required to create one but no!

My daughters each had a friend over and I snuck off to try the Voki website out http://www.voki.com/mywebsite.php . Within 5 minutes I had a cluster of 4 children (ages 7-10 years) around me completely enthralled. They each wanted a voki of themselves and especially liked the characters under 'oddball'. Also a hit was the 'animated' background and text recording. Slight changes needed to be made in spelling to make words phonetically accurate - asked needed to be typed in as ASSKED.

Initially I thought that Vokis would only be useful as a hook to catch student's attention as part of a topic introduction. However, given my audience reaction and the relative ease of use I would like to try it with children publishing their own stories (100 words max). I think that setting a time limit on character set up would be useful because otherwise that part could take all day!

The Vokis that I made today are:
http://www.voki.com/php/viewmessage/?chsm=48252b3abd885c6f65de0f11477182f6&mId=1157847
and
http://www.voki.com/php/viewmessage/?chsm=550ddd749911d3276c62f572bdb744f7&mId=1158013

I also made one up of my son saying 'I must get a haircut' and emailed it to him at boarding school. He text straight back so it definitely was attention grabbing!

As an aside I did try Monk-e-maker at www.careerbuilder.com/monk-e-mail . This was fun but probably more suited to peer groups like Professional Development rather than the classroom. Again I sent one to my son which he loved.