"Virtually Voki!"

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Don't you just love it!? It's an avatar that has so many uses in your classroom. Voki or Voki Classroom allows you and your students to " create personalized speaking avatars and use them in your blog, profile, and email messages."

What I love about Voki is that it is a tech tool that is so simple to use. I had so much fun customizing my avatars, I played with the hair, eyes, skin tone, accessories, and even makeup! Adding a voice is as easy as making a phone call, text-to-speech,  recording with a microphone, or uploading an audio file. They also give you a vast assortment of backgrounds,and you can even download your own. (I found this out from my students)

 You are not on your own. Voki for Education wants to make sure that you use Voki  in a productive manner. Their website offers  a Teacher's Corner, a Voki Community, and even a Lesson Plan Database to help get you started. I already used it for a lesson that I was asked to add to the database. I  used it on our class blog, reminded students about upcoming events, created avatars and posted them on Edmodo to our Cali pen pals, and presented our African-American History projects.(See an example below) What a way to change a project that had become tedious for the students.  They worked on it at home and in school, and there's not one student who did not participate!

You can use it with any topic and it can be embedded on blogs, Edmodo, you name it using a code or a link. There is so much more I can do with Voki, the possibilities are virtually endless!