Voki, anyone?

[molly_duggan]

I have started experimenting with using VOKI in one of my courses.  Has anyone else tried this tool? How have your students responded?  How have you used it?

I am considering using VOKI to demonstrate office games (and how not to play them) but wanted to see what others may have tried.

thanks!

[kona]

 @molly_duggan , I’ve never heard of this tool before. Did you end up using it with your students? How did it work out?

[molly_duggan]

Hello,  @kona !

Thanks for following up.

A Voki is an education tool  - an animated avatar - that allows users to create their own talking character. Voki characters can be customized to look like historical figures, cartoons, animals, and even yourself! The avatar I use here in Canvas is a Voki of me 🙂

I used several Voki this semester in a course I had gamified, having them serve as tour guides taking students around a community college campus. In my gamified course, students attended an online social then were greeted by this tour guide:

I experimented with using Voki in several ways in this course, having them explain an assignment, provide content, and weave a narrative, Probably my favorite experiment was in combining several Voki to relay community college access stories.  I can embed these directly into Canvas, decreasing the chance of losing students once they leave 🙂

I have found them to be fun and easy to create, but I wanted to see what others are doing with VOKI in higher education.  I still have plans to use Voki to demonstrate how not to communicate (workplace games) but have run out of energy for this semester 🙂

I blogged about my use of Voki in a gamified course .. When I have surveyed students about the use of Voki, some enjoyed them, others did not.

[kona]

Wow! This is great work! Have you checked out some of the stuff posted in the https://community.canvaslms.com/groups/gamification group here in the Community? They've got some great resources and I could see them really appreciating/enjoying learning more about what you're doing. I would recommend joining the group and then sharing this with them!

[molly_duggan]

I will do so 🙂  thanks,  @kona 

[GideonWilliams]

Used it a huge amount in the days it was free. It is an awesome tool and so accessible to students. Students often create their own and added them to their ePortfolio - not only do they make the page come to life but students also leanr great skills creating, publishing and presenting them.

If you have a diverse student body then creating instructions in different mother tongues would be a cool way of introducing tasks and getting students to think about others around them.

Getting language teachers to work with voki is also a must!

[molly_duggan]

 @GideonWilliams ‌  Great ides!  thanks for sharing!