Voki in the Classroom - a First Attempt

Okay, I finally decided to give it a go and see what happened. I created a Gmail account on behalf of each Year 6 class, and then registered with the Voki website. I decided I'd try that first, before going to the effort of creating individual e-mail addresses for all 58 students. My worry was that we would not all be able to log-on at the same time with the same username/password. I waited until the last 15 minutes of the lesson, and told them that it was just an experiment, and might not work, but we all managed to log-on without a problem! Some of them had already found the website and experimented at home after I mentioned it in a lesson a couple of weeks ago. I insisted that we all log-on with the class e-mail, so I can keep track of their class work.

The kids had a great time trying out the possibilities. There was great laughter when we first logged-on, and students were running from desk to desk to check out the random Vokis generated by the website when you first log-on.

Unfortunately, there was one point I forgot - you can't save a Voki until you have given it a voice. We ran out of time to try out any recording (in hindsight, I could have just asked them to type in "hello" so that there was at least something there, and we could edit it later) so most of the students didn't save anything. I made a rule that everything saved must have their own name included, so we know whose Voki is whose.

I spoke today to a mother of a Year 6 boy who isn't the most enthusiastic language-learner. She said that he came home yesterday and told her that he did some "cool stuff" in Japanese today. Yay! A step in the right direction.