Voki

What is Voki?

Voki is a website that enables users to express themselves on the web in their own voice using a talking character. 

For the visual part, you can customize your Voki in many aspects, for example you can choose your favorite character, the background picture, you can choose his/her clothes and even the color of the eyes.

And when it comes to voice, you can either directly record yourself speaking on Voki, or you can upload a recording, and you can also choose another voice and type your sentences so that he/she would read it for you.

After finishing your Voki, you can send a link to others' email or embed it into your own blog or your face book account.

How to use Voki?

Why language teachers should use Voki?

What are the limitations of Voki?

• The recording is limited to only one minute, which is too short for speaking practice. But if you pay and become a member, you can get more time to speak and record.
• There are so many options for customization that young learners may be easily distracted to the look of the characters rather than focus on speaking practice.
• It seems you can only embed one Voki in one post, you can't do more in one post.
• At least on my computer, the recording doesn't go well, therefore, I made a recording on Vocaroo and then upload it on Voki. Hopefully, it works well on others'.

Vocaroo

What is Vocaroo? 

Vocaroo is an online voice recorder. It allows people to record their voices and email it to others or download the document or embed it in a blog.

How to use Vocaroo?

Russell Stannard, a leading scholar for ICT in ELT, has a very helpful website called Teacher Training videos. It is especially designed for language teachers. This website introduces many fabulous language learning websites (including Vocaroo) or software for free. 

Please click here for further instruction of using Vocaroo.

Why language teachers should use Vocaroo?

• With this fabulous tool, teachers can get students to really practice speaking outside the classroom, which has long been a very tough problem for language teachers using traditional teaching methods.
• Recordings seem to 'exaggerate' any minor mistakes, hesitations, repetitions, accents and mispronunciations etc, which are often ignored in a natural conversation. Students, by listening to their own recordings could notice their own weakness and make efforts to improve on those points.
• There is a 'Retry' button so that students can record as many times as they want until they are satisfied with themselves. Therefore, this tool encourages learner autonomy.

How can Vocaroo foster language learning?

• Speaking Assignment. With this fabulous tool, teachers could give speaking assignments to students. After school, students could record their themselves talking about the topic they have just learned in class and then simply send a link to their teachers. According to Stannard's 'The Connected Classroom' theory, the more the teacher connects what students have learned in the classroom with what students are required to talk about outside the classroom, the more motivated students would become and the better they would perform in their recordings.
• Correcting pronunciation. This tool can also be used to help students correct their pronunciation. For example, students can download an audio piece of BBC news, listen to it, read after it and try their best to imitate the reporters pronunciation for several times. And then, students could record themselves reading out loud this piece of news and compare it with the original version to discover the differences so as to improve pronunciation. This is a typical example of how Vocaroo could promote learner autonomy.
•  Vocal feedback. A traditional written feedback takes a long time and contains only a few information. With Vocaroo, teachers could give students vocal feedback within a short time that contains a lot more information. Students, by listening to the teacher's vocal feedback, may feel more engaged and motivated because they can feel the emotion and  the emphasis from the teachers' tone.  Students can also give each other feedback using Vocaroo. 

What are the limitations of Vocaroo?

• Because the recordings 'exaggerate' all the mistakes, students may feel discouraged by their poor performance and become less motivated.
• It can only record voices. But when students want to use some pictures or power point slide to illustrate their points, Vocaroo become less useful.