Teaching English with Avatars. The newest trend!

 

voki.com

Have you ever felt that your lessons are not that interesting anymore? Or that your students are bored with your teaching? You are not alone! As time goes by, our students start to get used to our lessons and lose interest in them. That's why we always need to look for new ways of spicing up our classes. Last week, I discovered a website in which you can create your own talking avatar, and maybe this can help you to bring more fun to your classroom.

Voki

voki.com

Voki.com is a very interesting online platform with a great potential to be used in the teaching of foreign languages. You can use it to teach English in many ways. The idea is that you create your own character (avatar) and you add a voice or some sound to it. There is a huge variety of avatars you can choose, from emoticons to 3D people. It is very fun. You can even customize these avatars by changing their skin and eye color, accessories and so on. I am sure your students will love it.

You can access the Voki platform here.

Using Voki with my students

I started to use Voki website with my students last Wednesday. It was a very good experience. They got really excited when I told them they could create their own talking avatars in this website. We were working on a lesson about animals from different continents, and I came up with the idea of engaging them a little bit more in this lesson through the use of the avatars available in the volki website.

First, I asked them to choose an animal avatar and do a quick search about the continent where this animal is originally from and the food they generally eat. Second, I told them to pretend they were these animals and introduce themselves by telling their names, their place of origin (continents) and the type of food they like to eat. They really enjoyed this activity and we all had a lot of fun. You can watch it in the video below.

Advantages to language teaching

I would say that one of the strongest features of this tool has to do with its audio-visual nature. The fact that our students can record their voices, listen to their avatars and see them all at the same time is a plus when it comes to using it to teach a foreign language. This is a very useful resource that can be used to enhance your students' listening, speaking and writing skills.

There are several approaches to language teaching you can use this tool with. Here, for example, I used this tool to promote "the practice moment" of a lesson based on the PPP approach (presentation, production and practice). You can also create activities based on the Task-based approach. You could ask your students, for example, to pretend they work for a marketing agency and their task is to advertise a product or a service with the avatars they created.

The only limitations I've found in the voki platform are as follows: First, if you want to have access to all the avatars, you will need to buy a special membership; second, you cannot add an audio that is longer than 60 seconds to your avatar if you are using the free version. Apart from these limitations, everything else is quite useful when it comes to using it to teach a foreign language.

 

That's all for today. See you on the next post!