Postcasting: Voki

Podcasting: Voki

Voki is a really funny educational tool that allows us to create our own talking characters. I find this tool very useful for shy students. 

This is the link to my Voki presentation:  http://www.voki.com/site/pickup?scid=12123816&chsm=ab91781927d30be0979afc7c69c051af

I want to share a wonderful experience I had during one of my classes at the institute. I am teaching English language to beginners, the group is composed of two boys and one girl. We were working on the topic “Animals in Danger of Extinction” so I proposed them to look for information about native animals in our province that are facing this problem. Once the students had the information about the topic, they had to present it on a Voki presentation. The “funny” problem occurred when I explained to them what is a Voki presentation! because they were extremely eager to use this tool. They were more interested in using this online resource than to present their works. 😂 I tried to lower their anxiety and all of them worked in a wonderful way. The girl, who is the shiest of the three students,  created a beautiful woman to talk about the hare as an endangered species in our province. One of the boys chose a dog to talk about the puma and the other boy chose a handsome man to talk about the jaguar.

I am convinced that the experience the student had to work with an engaging tool as it is Voki was very positive. They could work not only with vocabulary about the topic but also with vocabulary that they knew such as “clothing”, “hair”, “mouth”, “eyes”, “skin” etc. when they were creating their avatars. Furthermore, all of the students were very careful when typing their texts because after several trials they could recognize that if they typed a word in a wrong way, the pronunciation seemed to be “strange” as one of them told me. Needless to say, from that day onwards with every topic we are working I hear the question “Can we use the Voki?”

So, I implemented this online tool in the report stage of the task but we can also take advantage of using it in the presentation stage as a way of introducing a topic which is an idea I´m going to implement in the next classes because they enjoyed a lot working with Voki...and when learning is accompanied with enjoyment  success is guaranteed.