Voki - animated avatars to get your pupils talking in a foreign language of your choice

Voki is a free service which allows you to create your own customised speaking character and publish it on your personal site or blog. You decide on the appearance of your avatar by choosing from a list of different options such as the shape and colour of your eyes or hair and what clothes you wear.

Once you have chosen your preferred look, you can add a voiceover by recording yourself with a microphone, ringing a special number and leaving a message, using the text-to-speech feature or by uploading a pre-prepared sound file from your hard disk. Recordings cannot be longer than a minute though so they may need careful scripting. For the above example, I used Audacity to make my recording which I then exported as an mp3 file to my desktop and uploaded from there.

Don't forget to save your avatar when you've finished and then just generate the necessary html code to embed it on your site. For mine, I choose the MySpace option as the Typepad code didn't seem to work for some reason. I also customised the width of the avatar (370) so it fitted nicely in the body text of my blog.

I'm delighted Oddcast the company who runs Voki have decided to make a free alternative to their commercial service Sitepal designed for businesses to promote their products as it create a whole range of new opportunities for language teachers wanting to extending their pupils' speaking skills in a fun and engaging way. Why not try it out with your pupils and and see if it gets them talking.

Comments

[Paul Harrington]

yup another cool little tool - all playing to our love of little gadgets !!! I look forward to how the Nodehill Bloggers will incorporate this into their blogs : ) Paul

[kristianstill]

Morning Joe, yes it seems to be the week of the avatar. Rockyou, gizmoz and voki. I must admit I like the flixn professional look but the student have enjoyed being updated by the likes of Ronaldinho and David Beckham from gizmoz.

[Joe Dale]

Hi guys,

Thanks for your comments. I thought it was about time I put a little character into my blog.

[Joe Dale]

I see Mr Chambers, geography teacher at St Ivo School in Cambridgeshire has picked up on the idea of using Voki in class by reading this blog. Thanks for passing by Mr Chambers!

Have a look at his posts here:

http://igeog.wordpress.com/2007/06/17/voki-new-approaches-geography-vodcasts/

http://igeogblogger.blogspot.com/2007/06/voki-geography.html

You may be interested in checking out my colleague Mr Peace's blogs here, Mr Chambers:

http://joedale.typepad.com/integrating_ict_into_the_/2007/06/its_all_geograp.html

[Barbara Harper]

I have found your blog and TES reports really useful Joe, and enjoy trying out these new techniques. I'm still not doing very well in whole class use though. I've just got my Year 10 class to create their own Voki avatar, but now I want them to share them. I really want to enable them to share their efforts and enjoy them. I created a Blog (on blogger.com) but am stuck now on how to upload the avatars+sound files to this programme. Any ideas? Thanks Barbara

[Joe Dale]

Hi Barbara,

You need to copy the HTML code from your Voki characters. I find the MySpace code seems to do the trick for Typepad. Then go to your Blogger post and click on edit HTML and then paste it in.

Try that.

[Kenneth McLaughlin]

As I listen to the avatar I'm reminded of Creature Comforts: where a voice is in sync with the clay animation. LOL :D

[Vanessa]

Hi there,

This is Vanessa from SitePal (Oddcast). Thanks for your post about Voki! You might be interested in SitePal's new Virtual Translator demo for your students. Type anything you want, and an animated character will translate it for you and speak it in another language of your choice!

http://www.oddcast.com/home/demos/tts/tts_tran_example.php?sitepal

For more demos you can go here: http://www.sitepal.com/demos

Thanks and have fun with the demos!