Voki Avatars

To create my avatar above, i used the free online service http://www.voki.com/ which enables people to personalise an avatar and post it to a blog or send via email. The value of these avatars in presenting educational direction and information is limitless, and they are so easy to make!

The use of avatars in education enables learning managers (teachers) to make lesson delivery more engaging for the digital native students. Learning managers may create one or many avatars and use them in blogs, wikis or during lessons to introduce a topic, provide knowledge or direction for an activity. Students can create their own avatars to use in online discussions, record a speech for practice or to present an assignment with a sense of anonymity.

To create my avatar i first created an account at http://www.voki.com/. The following steps to create the avatar where pretty simple, choose the type of avatar you wish to create be it an animal, person, anime etcetera. To the right of the avatar are the controls, by flicking around and working out how to make changes, I was able to easily produce my above avatar. However adjusting things like eye colour, size of mouth and hair colour required a little bit of clicking around and working out how to change certain things.

The next step was to create speech for my avatar. There are options to record your voice or to type text to be spoken and select the accent and gender of the voice to be used. I chose to use one of the pre-recorded voices existing as I haven't the means to record my own voice at present.

This process was quite quick and enjoyable. I do believe that this is an ICT application that I will use regularly married with blogs or wikis to provide an engaging and enriching learning program for my students.

Something to think about:
Imagine using an avatar to aid delivery of educational instruction or knowledge while you are away sick or at a PD day. Just think how much students would enjoy having the familiarity of your voice or a recognisable avatar to provide them with direction while you are absent and how the substitute teacher would appreciate the assistance!