Voki, Speaking Avatars!/GiveaWay!

 

 

Okay, imagine this. Your students are completing biographies on famous people. You could go the traditional route and have them write a report. OR, you could use Voki.

How much more interesting to hear the report from an avatar that represents a biographical figure, a character in a book, even the student themselves!

The great thing is, Voki can be shared with a link, email, or using the embed code!  READ MORE…

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“Virtually Voki”

Click the Play button.  Don’t you just love it!?

It’s an avatar that has so many uses in your classroom.  Voki for Education allows you and your students to ” create personalized speaking avatars and use them in your blog, profile, and email messages.”  What I love about Voki is that it is a tech tool that is so simple to use. I had so much fun customizing my avatars, I played with the hair, eyes, skin tone, accessories, and even makeup! Adding a voice is as easy as making a phone call, text-to-speech,  recording with a microphone, or uploading an audio file. They also give you a vast assortment of backgrounds,and you can even download your own. (I found this out from my students)

And believe me, you are not on your own. Voki for Education wants to make sure that you use Voki  in a productive manner. Their website  offers  a Teacher’s Corner, a Voki Community, and even a Lesson Plan Database to help get you started. I already used it for a lesson that I was asked to add to the database. I have used it on our class blog, used it to remind students about upcoming events, we created avatars and posted them on Edmodo to our Cali pen pals, and we used them for our African-American History projects.(See an example below) What a way to change a project that had become tedious for the students.  They worked on it at home and in school, and there’s not one student who did not participate! And of course, you can use it with any topic.

I know there is so much more I can do with Voki, the possibilities are virtually endless!

“Oprah Winfrey” Voki  history project

Edmodo- Gotta Love It!

I have to admit, I thought I had written a post  about Edmodo. Why wouldn’t I?  Ever since I discovered it, it has been a staple in my 5th grade class. However, I realized I didn’t, when I read another post, “Edmodo, yes”!   from the blog Technology Chatter.  How could I have forgotten to write about Edmodo, which  has made my life wonderfully easy.  How?   When I describe it to colleagues, I call it the “Facebook for Educators”, but it’s more than that.  I post assignments on Edmodo every day. Not just “read page 43 in your textbook” assignments either. I can post images, videos, questions, tests, worksheets, polls, have discussions online. Any work I have them “turn in” can be graded online, and their grades are posted privately. No paper! So, it’s environmentally friendly as well.  I have created groups for every subject.  It even has communities where teachers can connect, our own little PLN. And now, they have Edmodo for Parents, still unexplored territory for me.

But my favorite part of Edmodo is my Pen Pal group.  I joined the Language Arts community and asked if anyone was interested in being pen pals. Mrs.T  and I, not only have our classes write to each other, but we also formed a Pen Pal group on Edmodo.  Our classes have shared photos, movie clips, comments, birthday wishes, weekend happenings, weather updates, and our  latest, Voki conversations. I already had a Voki and Mrs.T was kind enough to email me instructions on how to post it. The first thing my kids do in the morning is check Edmodo to see if their pen pals wrote them, they are so excited! Recently Mrs.T sent pics of the beach, after I sent pics of the kids in the snow.:) It’s just a great way for them to communicate with students outside of their school, outside of their state! The students are writing and Mrs. T and I are sharing ideas. I know as the year progresses, I am sure we will discover more ways we can connect our classes.  In the meantime, I will continue to use Edmodo in my class, my own little piece of educator heaven.:)