Voki madness.
Get a Voki now!
You may have noticed rather a lot of Voki action on ¡Vámonos! today as 6VH and I had an experiment with Voki.com. We're coming to the end of unit on school and to round it off, we were making up paragraphs about school. As the SIP is highlighting AfL and because I think it's a valuable way of monitoring, assessing and practising listening and speaking, we're doing lots of audio recording. Yesterday, 3AT had a go at recording Spanish weather forecasts using Audacity. This morning 5SD were recording information about the solar system in Spanish - they all tried to do it at the same time having discovered that the laptops had in built microphones (cue various raps, football chants and random utterances before they got to work) but this proved to be unsatisfactory so we set up two recording areas outside the classroom and in the cloakroom.
This afternoon, 6VH were supposed to planning their scripts for the first part of the lesson. However, being inquisitive kids, they noticed that I was making sure that Voki worked at school (it does sometimes and not others so have to check there and then!) and before I knew it were on logged on and following what I was doing.
Sadly, the record facility in Voki wasn't working today, so i had to record in Audacity, export as a .WAV and then use the upload function to make my (introductory) Voki. I uploaded it to my blog as I couldn't log in either!
Lots of the kids, by the time I played mine back, were well into exploring Voki. They had a good nose around and worked out that they could use the text to speech, and discovered that there are various Spanish voices - male and female - that read your text surprisingly fluently. I was very pleased with their independence.
If only we had experienced more reliable internet connection, less PCs crashing and a less hit-and-miss reaction from the Voki site, then we would have had more than five Voki published on my blog. However, the excitement generated in the class as we published those that did make it was a ray of sunshine after a really bad day.
Next week, we're going to make more and hopefully use Voicethread too to share our thoughts!
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