Friday, May 25, 2012

Throwing Your Voice!

So here's a fun site. Voki.com. Voki is designed for education. With Voki users can create one or more avatars.  Mine purposefully kind of looks like me.  Once the user creates his avatar, then he can type text which is spoken, or record his own voice.  When finished the avatar appears to be speaking the words.  Up to one minute of recording is possible.  Voki was designed to "help make your student's homework and class work assignments educational and entertaining".

As an Occupational Therapist, I like to use Voki to motivate a student to write. First we spend time making their avatar.  This is generally a fun task.  Much like when I use Toontastic (refer to App review), I have my students think about what their script will be, and then write it out.  Our focus may be to use proper letter formation, sizing, spacing, orientation, etc.  When they've done a satisfactory job, we record the script.  When we are done we can save the end product, and email it to their teachers or parents.

Voki could be a useful tool for making short Social Stories, or to act out social skills.  In addition, the website offers free lesson plans that can be sorted by subject as well as grade level.  All of this is free to the user. There is a version called Voki Classroom which allows the teacher/therapist to create classroom accounts and manage student accounts.  Voki Classroom is a subscription product, $29.95 for a year, or $44.95 for two years.  Naturally, there are no ads in the Classroom site.


Happy Therapy!

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