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This is my distance education lesson on how to create a voki character for education 631.
Voki is a free service for educators that allows you to create and customize your own
avatar and you are also able to add a voice to the avatar. Once you have completed making
the avatar you can post it to any webpage, blog, or profile. Or you can simply leave
it saved to your voki account. Voki also offers access to a wide range of learning resources
for educators. How to make you own voki character. First
you're going to click on your web browser and it works for any web browser including
google chrome, firefox, internet explorer, and safari. Then you are going to click on
your toolbar and type in www.voki.com and that is spelled V-O-K-I. Then you will press
the enter key. Before beginning to make your own voki character you must register using
a valid email address and password. Once you have logged in you can begin to create your
voki character! Now I am going to take you through the step
by step tutorial on how to create your own character. I am going to click on google chrome
and then in the toolbar I will type in www.voki.com and press enter. This is what the voki webage
looks like and if you are a first time user you are going to have to have to go to the
right side on the top and click on register. You will register using a email address and
creating a password. To log in you will type in your email address and password and click
on log in. Once you have logged in it will automatically take you to the my voki tab.
You can see here that I have vokis that have previously been saved. I even have one that
goes back to 2012. Your vokis will always stay here under your account and can access
them whenever you need to. To create a new voki I will simply click on the orange plus
sign where it says create a new voki. This is where the fun begins because you get to
create a customized avatar for your students. To begin creating my voki I will click on
the silhouette of a person where my mouse is pointing. This is where I will choose my
character. Voki offers many different characters to choose from including political figures,
3-d figures, animals, and cartoons. It really depends on what kind of lesson you are wanting
to teach to your students. Voki really works for any content area and also for any grade
level. I am going to choose the dog that they have already picked for me. I want you to
notice the tabs up top. Some of your voki characters will allow you to change their
clothing and accessories such as sunglasses and jewelry. Also, if you have a person character
you can customize their hair and some of their facial features. Under your character I want
you to notice that you can change eye color on here. You can also change the color of
their mouth and also their skin color. Where it says tweak that allows you can customize
their facial features. I can make his mouth bigger or smaller. I can change the size of
his nose. Any of the options they give you will enable you to change them if you would
like to. Once I am satisfied with how my character looks I will press the green done button at
the bottom. My new option is to give my character a voice. You have 4 options to do this. You
can record what you want your character to say by phone. You can type it in and then
choose a voice that voki offers for you. You can record your own voice by microphone or
you can upload an audio file. For today I am simply going to click on the text and type
in what I want my character to say. I am going to type in "hello. How are you doing today?".
Then I want you to notice that they give you a large variety of languages and accents to
choose from. This is wonderful for foreign language teachers or if you have an English
language learner in your classroom you are able to modify and accommodate for that student
by selecting a language that they do well in. I am going to select English. You can
also pick the voice of your voki character. You can choose different male and female voices.
They are from different countries. Before you click done I want you to notice the play
button under the text box. This play button allows you to hear what your voki character
sounds like. Once you are satisfied with how your voki character sounds you will click
the green done button. Then you get to choose a background for your voki character. I think
this is wonderful because it can make your character more relatable to what the students
are learning about. For example, if they are learning about space I could choose an outer
space background or if they are learning about the rainforest you can choose a rainforest
background. The possibilities are endless. I am just going to choose the volcano for
my background today. Once I am satisfied with my background I am going to click on the green
done button. The last thing you can customize is the color around your voki character. You
click on the players button. Then you can choose the colors that they offer for you.
The color around your character will change and then I am going to click the done bottom
again. I want you to notice that any point in time you can go back and change your character
or the voice you have given them. It is not final until you click the publish button.
Once I am satisfied with my character I will click on the publish button where my cursor
is pointing. It will take a few moments for it to load but first I have to give it a title
and I am just going to name mine dog and I am going to press save. It will take a few
seconds for it to load and it will let you kknow once it has been successfully saved.
The next screen it will give you is the option to publish to your website or friends. This
is wonderful because you can share it on facebook, twitter, edmodo, or blogs. This is great for
your students because sometimes they may forget what they learn during the day and if you
are using voki characters to record what you are teaching them they can rewatch these voki
characters at home and refresh their memory. I am not going to publish my voki character
today. I am simply going to go back to the my voki tab at the top. Once I get there I
can see that my new character has successfully been created and saved so that I can go back
and access it at any time. I want to draw your attention to the tabs at the top. The
first tab says create and that is where you can create your voki character. The my voki
is where all of your vokis are saved at. The learn tab is just tutorials for you incase
you need a refresher on how to create a voki. I really want to point out the lesson plan
tab. This is a great resource because you can search through lesson plans and voki characters
that have already been created by other teachers. You can search by subject and grade level.
It is really great sharing these with other teachers as well and you can search it anytime
to see if there is anything useful for your own classroom. This concludes my lesson on
how to create a voki character and I hope this has given you inspiration to create your
own character. Thank you.