Voki: Is it a worthwhile educational tool?

What is Voki?

Voki is a free service that allows you to create customised speaking characters. It is as cool as it sounds. Imagine back to when you were at school, what would you have thought if a teacher came into a class with an interactive speaking character? Yes, you would probably initially think your teacher had lost it but then once you saw the character you would realise the creativity and ‘coolness’ of the service.

Voki is a creative, easy-to-use tool that helps motivate students and improves lesson comprehension and student participation. It is simple to get started creating your very own Voki. Using the simple interface, customize the look of your Voki; choose your head, clothes, and accessories. Give your Voki a voice and add a background. It literally takes minutes to set up. Customize your Voki character to look like historical figures, cartoons, animals, etc. Teachers and students can create different avatars to help students leans in a more engaging way.

It is just as easy to share your Vokis. Voki gives you the chance to share your Voki through email, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress and so much more.

Voki even has an area which consists of lesson plans and lesson ideas for teachers. Voki is a very useful website for teachers as it also offers tutorials and a blog for different tips and hints. Voki allows the teacher to create a class username and password, rather than having to get pupils email addresses and own username.

Voki also has a Voki Classroom section and a Voki Presenter Section.

Personally I think Voki is an intriguing way of getting students involved in their learning. They could use Voki to create presentations based on famous people they are learning about or use them to create characters for English.

So to answer my question… Is Voki a worthwhile educational tool? Yes, I think Voki is a worthwhile educational tool as it allows students to virtually see their learning come to life.

For some reason I cannot share my Voki on my blog, but pop over to my twitter account where I have shared my Voki.

Padlet

What is Padlet?

A few years ago I completed a course on the use of ICT in the classroom. However, it was previously known Wallwisher.  Padlet is a virtual wall that allows people to express their thoughts on a common optic easily. It is a free online application that works like a bulletin board. It works like an online sheet of paper where people can put any content.

What content can I add?
One can add images, videos, documents, texts and much more.

Privacy settings:

Settings allow you to make your wall completely open for public contributions, completely private, or allow you to moderate any changes made.

How can one use Padlet?

One can use Padlet create a collaborative learning environment.

One can use Padlet as a personal blog or use it for student blogs.

It is a good environment to help gather students’ contributions and opinions on certain topics. It is a really simple way of integrating collaborative and interactive work into the class.

An environment to collect vocab, brainstorms and web links.

It is so easy to set up and is a beneficial tool for teachers in the classroom. I’ll definitely be using Padlet with my students in the new year.

Diigo

It is coming up to the final week of college for semester one, and as part of our final lecture we had to research a Web 2.0 technology that we haven’t discussed yet and present what it is and how it would be beneficial to us. I chose to research Diigo.

Diigo is an online tool that does many things. It started off as a normal bookmarking website but it has transformed into so much more. It is now an online tool that improves workflow and productivity….How you ask? Well, it allows one to collect and organise anything, whether it be bookmarks, highlights, screenshots, images, etc. It even allows you to write on the screenshots, makes little notes through the use of sticky notes. And something which makes it even better is the fact that you can access it anywhere, whether you are at home on the laptop, on the way to college or school on your iphone, you can access your account anywhere.

All you need to do is sign up and then the world is your oyster. You have so many options. You can annotate by highlighting text, make sticky notes, highlight in different colours to organise your information, take screenshots, write on your screenshots, read later option and much more.

When I was completing my undergraduate degree we were always given links to documents and I am one of those people who need to underline, highlight or write on the page to make sure it is going into my head. As a result I always had to print the document out which was a waste of paper, because once I was finished with it it was never touched again. I wish I had known about this tool it would have made my life so much easier, it makes you interact with the writing on the screen because you can do so many different things with it to alter it. Diigo really is a lifesaver and I think it would work well with an older class to help make a class library where useful information is stored and all students can view it.

Everything you highlight or annotate is saved to your library, so never lose a document or quote again. Then you have the option to share your annotations with a group of friends, as well as making it private. I think it would be extremely useful for students doing a project together, they could collect all the information and save it to their library and collaborate with each other about the information.

I hope you strongly consider using it. I have only started using it over the past few days and it has saved me a lot of paper already. I am so excited to research my Thesis topic with this new tool.

Below is my presentation that I created to help explain what Diigo is.

Diigo