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20 March 2009

CREATE A TALKING AVATAR TO ENGAGE YOUR STUDENTS

Engaging students online can be tough on an educator,but it can be very interesting for both teacher and student if an avatar or two are created and used in the class blog or wiki. Emails with an avatar also are much more interactive particularly if the avatars are given a personality and a voice.Yes,a voice! Voki is a website that allows you to create an avatar using the ready library of faces,clothes,hair,colours and then changing the background .Once ready,you can lend it your voice,using a microphone or use the phone in option or the text to speech option or even upload an audio file.You can then choose a player and also choose whether the Voki should load onto your blog/email and begin speaking as soon as the page loads onto the recipient's browser.Teachers have been experimenting with speaking avatars and find that the class becomes at once more lively and engaged as the teacher is able to increase the attention span of students.When students are given the opportunity of creating their own,and using their own voice to record,they learn faster,especially languages.
Teachers who have successfully used these speaking avatars have used it in the following ways.
  1. Creating a personality very much like herself,a teacher changes the dress and colours of her avatar every day according to what she will be wearing that day and uses the phone in option to record her voice and tells the class to prepare for a certain lesson to be done that day. Assignments are also given out this way.
  2. Another language teacher asks her students to create their personality avatars and engage in fruitful conversation in the language being pursued.
  3. Embedding an avatar in the classblog's sidebar can be fun,too,as children are allowed to comment in their own voices with their own avatars.
  4. Visitors to any blog can be welcomed with such a speaking avatar,and readers quickly respond to a human voice urging them to sign up for a newsletter,or subscribe to the blog.
  5. Announcements to any upcoming event can be effectively announced with a personal avatar.
  6. An avatar can be used in emails as well.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Students wish to learn new things everyday. They work with full involvement when they find things new and interesting. Teachers
encourage students for online learning in addition to classroom learning to get exposed with the latest trends. I found a website lively where I got information to create a talking avatar to encourage the students.

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