Voki – Give your students a voice

Voki is a mixture of two latin words that mean voice and a name of mythical horse that could change shape hence “Vox” and “Loki’ became Voki. However Voki on the online Web 2.0 world means an educational tool that allows you to create your own talking avatar.

It’s a FREE, easy to use tool that can be used to enhance your teaching and the learning of your students. The creators of Voki, Oddcast claim that their service will always be free for educators and students, so you will never have to plan for this application in your annual budget plan if you want to use it individually for your students and classes. They also offer a classroom package at a low rate of $30 a year. The classroom Voki allows greater control to teachers. More details can be found here.

Some of the fetures of Voki are:

Add your own voice
Add a pre-programmed voice
Share it on your presentation, Blog or site
Available in 25 languages
25 Accents
Male and female voice overs

Some suggestions in using Voki can be to get students to record their own voice to share a story or an event. It’s a fun way to get the EAL students to build confidence. Allow EAL students to understand different accents. Allow language classes to be more fun and interactive. You can do so much more with a little bit of creativity.

Below are two examples of how I have used Voki:

Voki used to introduce my website with my own voice over:
http://vhss-d.oddcast.com/vhss_editors/voki_player.swf?doc=http%3A%2F%2Fvhss-d.oddcast.com%2Fphp%2Fvhss_editors%2Fgetvoki%2Fchsm=298f8ac4f3b2fd8bb542c773fe8f58e3%26sc=2581744

Voki used to introduce a training session with a pre-programmed voice over:
http://vhss-d.oddcast.com/vhss_editors/voki_player.swf?doc=http%3A%2F%2Fvhss-d.oddcast.com%2Fphp%2Fvhss_editors%2Fgetvoki%2Fchsm=12fd15ffe402251ac280d2624f1f3a6b%26sc=8171611

Over 1.5 million people are using it already, so why not use Voki and give your students a voice.