1. An interesting teaching website-- Voki!

Hello everyone, I am a TESOL student from the University of Warwick. I am very interested in trying out different teaching tools. Today I want to share you the usage of Voki.

Voki is a very interesting website. All you need to do is just upload your text or audio, then select the character and voice you like, and it can generate the teaching animation automatically.

I used it to create a simple video. The link is in My Video.

You can choose different lovely characters:


And there are different kinds of accents:


Just type what you want to say or upload an audio:

Click the "save" and you can get a video.

This tool is very easy to operate. If you want your class to look more interesting, you should adopt this way.

I find that in my class, some students are very shy, especially when they are engaged in oral conversations. By using voki, they can bind themselves to the character and use a little cat or dog to replace their own. This is conducive to helping them get rid of their anxiety in oral communication, reduce their psychological pressure and enhance their enthusiasm for learning English. In this way, they can feel safe, private and fun.

 

Voki allow students control their own characters and voice, then show it to others, the tool is related to both intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. They have fun to creat a video and it made them practice their creativity, when they save the video thay can share it, so they can get feedback from outside.

 

About the application of Voki in the classroom, I will use it for younger English learners. In the first class, each student should create a digital character and record a 1-minute introduction of their ideal job in English. They can chose the character like doctor, teacher or anyone else, express their desires through their ideal images and voices.

 


Like most tools, Voki isn’t perfect, it has some limitations. The free version is quite limited— only a few characters and basic voice options are available. Because of the technical  limitation, the voice doesn’t always reflect natural pronunciation, it sounds  a little bit weird. 

 

By the way, I think Voki is a autonomy-enhancing tool. It reduce the gap between students’ thinking and speaking, it is suitable for teachers especially in online contexts, Voki is definitely worth trying.



















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