Let´s Learn with Voki

Let´s Learn with Voki

Do you know what Voki is?

Voki is an educational tool that permits its users to create their own talking character.
Voki characters can be customized to look like historical figures, cartoons, animals, and even yourself.
Users can give their Voki a voice by recording with a microphone, using their dial-in number, or uploading an audio file. (Voki, 2019)

Linguistic skills can be reinforced with this tool

This tool provides an excellent option to reinforce students´ speaking ability. Also, it can be used to help student pratice listening by listening to teacher´s or classmates´ talking characters. 

Activities That an EFL Teacher Could Carry Out Using Voice Threat

Activity #1- The teacher writes on the board a list of topics that usually catch young people´s attention. Then, he/she ask students to choose one topic of their interest. Once they have chosen the topic, the teacher will ask them to prepare a short comment (around 1 to 2 minutes) about that topic. Students can say what they want, they just have to express their opinion about it. After that, the teacher will ask them to create a talking character at home using Voki. They will use a Voki character to express their opinion orally. In class, students will show their characters to the teacher and the rest of their classmates. With this activity, the teacher can help students practice speaking in a more comfortable and funny way.

Acrivity #2- The teacher will create a funny talking character using his voice to introduce a topic in the class. He/she will show the character to students using a projector. After presenting the character, the teacher will group students (the number of members of each group depends on the quantity of students). Then, In groups they will discuss about what the teacher explained using the Voki character.

Activity #3- The teacher asks students to visit Voki.com and choose the character that they like the most and customize their appearance as they want. After choosing the character, students will create from 6 to 9 sentences in which they describe the character´s physical appearance as if they were the character. For example, I´m a boy, I have green eyes, I have brown hair, etc. When the sentences are ready, students will use their voices to express what they wrote using the talking character. Finally, students will present the character to the rest of the class using a projector.

Tips

I have some recommendations if you as a teacher wants to use Voki for teaching.

1. First of all, you have to make sure that all your students have acces to good internet connection.
2. Also, you must consider that for using this tool, students will need a smartphone or computer, so make sure all of them have one.
3. If you use this tool for evaluating writing, you should prepared a scoring rubric to assess your students´ production and participation.

I want to include a Protocol that I had to prepare for one of my major courses. In this Protocol I created some activities for EFL students in which they use Voki, so I invite you to take a look at it. It may will give you ideas about how to implement this tool with your students. This is the link https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rhcj-OB8kk1t9AlKzjhUY9mO-OsA2R3u/view?usp=sharing 

Voki is a really useful for teaching and learning purposes. The chance for speaking production that it offers can be useful for teachers if they want to help students improve their speaking ability. It a very interesting tool that teachers should use with their students for making classess more interesting and funny. 


Reference

Voki. (2019). About voki. Retrieved from https://www.voki.com/site/aboutVoki