This is a blog for young learners of French as a foreign language. Here they produce their own vokis. The 'voices' are not their own but those of the 'synthesised' selections you can choose from. So rather than the learners recording orally, then type in the text for it to be 'read' by the synthesised voice.
Young learner vokis
In French but transferable to Engish as a FL. The blog is clearly a space to which learners post their vokis for others to share and this seems to be a common use of blogs - more than a collaborative space as such perhaps? Maybe worth thinking about their affordances with these particular aims in mind - teacher blog, class blog, individual blog; task management, sharing, collaboration...
4 comments:
I think there would certainly be an appeal to young learners in producing their own vokis, particularly as an avatar for a school related webspace. Many of my students take great care over the visual aspect of their work and thye would do the same when creating vokis.
I have dabbled with the text-to-talk features of xtranormal.com with students before and one interesting aspect was that it highlighted spelling errors clearly as the reproduced speech was mis-pronounced. The desire for a 'perfect' display drove most of the students back to edit and correct!
It seems voki also has a recording option for adding your own voice which some of the kids may like to use if they don't go for the robotic accents.
Interesting observation about the accuracy aspect David. Yes, you can record your own voice - the ones I embedded on the blog were my experiments with this:-) But the flexibility to do text to talk or recording is quite attractive in different contexts with different resources.
I love voki!
Using it with kids though, they wasted loads of time choosing their character!
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