Prezi

This week I chose to dive into the Prezi program.  I have been very interested in this program since I saw a presentation on it last year for one of my classes.  The movement on the screen and the zooming in and out was so intriguing and it definitely held my attention.

Prezi is a presentation software program that would give Power Point a run for it's money.  Prezi claims to create "Game changing presentations online."  As with all of the other tools that I have evaluated, Prezi is a free online software program.  There are other Prezi packages that offer more bells and whistles that you can pay for but the basic Prezi account is free.

I tried making my own Prezi presentation this afternoon on Self-efficacy for my Psychology 20 class.  I didn't find Prezi as easy to work with as Power Point, mostly because it isn't linear, which is one of the benefits of the program but also something that makes it a bit less intuitive to work with. 

I found myself struggling a bit with the zoom effects, not really sure how the end result would turn out until I constantly checked the 'show' feature.  It took me roughly three hours to put together the presentation at the bottom of the page.  I am sure for future presentations that it will take me considerably less time as my learning curve was high.  I read (after I made the presentation) a good tip to put the rough sketch of your presentation together before putting it on Prezi so that you don't get lost in the program.  A good idea that I will definitely follow next time, as the first round through was a 'make it up as you go' type of presentation.  Perhaps I would also suggest for people who are not use to the software to copy a re-usable presentation and go from there, just to see what it is all about:, although you could wade through many low quality presentations in the re-usable section as well.

I do wonder if students will be as motivated as I was to learn the program.  I had a fairly high self-efficacy in terms of being able to learn the software but I would suggest that many of my students wouldn't.  When I try to get my students to learn Photostory instead of Power Point they whine and complain and many don't hand in the Photostory assignment because they don't want to learn the software.  I would suggest that learning Prezi is much tougher than learning Photostory, so I am a little fearful of requiring my students to use Prezi simply because I teach all online learning classes and without someone right there in the class to help then with their questions they may get frustrated and quit. 

Having said that I do think that I will use Prezi for a class presentation although I would not likely use it without adding sound to it.  I would likely use Camtasia or something similar to talk the students through the presentation.  Someone in a face to face class wouldn't likely need that option.

Benefits of Prezi:

• Creates an exciting presentation interface that is not linear.
• Allows one to embed media and pictures easily.
• The Basic account is free.
• One can send a link to the presentation so that people can view the presentation together.
• Up to 10 people can edit the same Prezi together

Drawbacks of Prezi:

• In order to add narration you would have to use a different program.
• The viewer can get motion sickness from all of the moving on the screen if overused.
• Takes a bit of time to learn how to use especially because it is not linear.
• Easy to make a presentation that is overrun with clutter.
• Is Prezi a tool for those bored with Power Point and will it soon hit the shelf as an overused tool as well?

Resources:

Good classroom assignment using Prezi to present their work in photography.
17 interesting ways to use Prezi in the classroom.
Interesting Blog on Power Point versus Prezi


My first Prezi on Self-Efficacy:

Twitter

 

Do you think you could use Twitter in your Saskatchewan classroom?

I decided to take some time to look at the educational effects of Twitter in the classroom.  Twitter is not something that I am naturally drawn to but during my ETAD 802 class I have become increasingly aware of how many people use twitter.  My need for belonging has kicked in and I am trying to belong in the world of Twitter in order to learn.

For anyone not familiar with Twitter, it is a social media website where people can send out messages in 140 characters or less.  The messages are usually available for all the world to see although you could change your settings so that your tweets are only visible by the people who are following you.  A tweet is the 140 character or less message that you send out and people can click to follow you or you can click to follow someone else so that their tweets automatically show up in your twitter home page.  You can have twitter linked to Facebook or your cell phone so that you can easily tweet via texting.

My fist thoughts on twitter were of why would I want to know the intimate details of people's lives.  If you are going to the store to get groceries why do I now want a text or a tweet to let me know?  'Going shopping, Reading a book, playing with my kids, eating at McDonald's'  Really, do I really want to know and how is that going to help me as a learner?  

Upon further reflection I can see how Twitter can be more than just a tool for letting people know that you just clipped your toenails.  Sure, if that was all people on Twitter did was check up on the social status of others the tool would get pretty old pretty fast, unless of course you were wanting to check up on your teenage child:)  In my limited twitter experience I can see that this is a social media that allows people to stay in touch.  Not just in their personal lives but in their educational lives as well.  People are constantly sending out tweets on good blogs or readings.  Together with the personal aspect that it can provide it can get a person converted into a regular Twitterer (is that even a word?  are they called tweeters?).  There is a community that develops through twitter where authentic learning can take place.

At the bottom of the page you will find links for how to use Twitter in the classroom but my biggest issue with using Twitter in the classroom has to do with all of the online classes that I have taken throughout my ETAD program.  I think this is the best masters program around, online or otherwise.  We have the best professors and I always feel connected to the people and the content.

What I can't help but notice is that none of these teachers have used Twitter in their teaching.  I know that my profs use Twitter and that they find it a valuable tool, so why have they not incorporated it into their online teaching?  Is it that when you prescribe learning through a particular online tool that one limits the learning and authentic communities or collectives that form?  Is it that it is one more tool in an overwhelming digital world and that you can't use everything all the time?  I wonder if my profs were forced to use Twitter in class if it would squash the the dynamic ever changing excitement of the medium.  Will I ever know? 

In any case I have listed the benefits, drawbacks, and resources for using Twitter in the classroom.

Benefits of using Twitter in (or for) the classroom:

• It can engage students in a way that is familiar to them through their cell phones or on Facebook.
• Parents could keep up with what is going on in the classroom.
• It can remind students on their cell phones about upcoming exams or assignments.
• It can give shy students a place to have a voice. 

So let's look at ways to use Twitter in the classroom:

• Create a twitter specifically for a course and have your students and parents follow the class.
  
• The teacher could post homework, highlight some cool and interesting videos that weren't shown in class.
  
• Post questions to your students and see who can answer them.  "How do you think that you can help alleviate the famine problem that countries like Somalia?"
  
• Create a discussion outside of the classroom that will engage and motivate students.

Drawbacks to Twitter in the classroom:

• Depending on the age of the child, I am not sure we have done a good enough job yet educating out students into proper usage of social media.
  
• What about the students who do not have access or want access to social media? Could using Twitter actually exclude students rather than include students?
  
• How many students in my school division actually use twitter now?  My assumption is that I would use twitter to connect with student using a tool that they already know.  If twitter is popular in some circles but it is not for my students, should I introduce Twitter to them or find a different avenue to reach them? 
  
• I suppose the question becomes, is Twitter a good tool to use in the classroom because it is popular already, or should one use Twitter because it is a good tool?
  

Websites that offer great idea for how to use Twitter in the classroom:

Over 100 ways to use Twitter in the classroom.

This is a great video showing 34 interesting ways to use Twitter in the classroom including character introductions, twitter polls, and linking classes from other regions. 

Below is a great video of how a university class used Twitter in the classroom by posting the students tweets live on an overhead through the class giving students an opportunity to participate in the discussion even if they are shy. 

A New Culture of Learning

I have just read the book "A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change" by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown on the recommendation of Charles Paul Bazin Webster.  I thought I would give it a read to see if it could connect the tools I have been looking at to learning in the classroom.  

"The new culture of learning is based on three principles: (1) The old ways of learning are unable to keep up with our rapidly changing world. (2) New media forms are making peer-to-peer learning easier and more natural. (3) Peer-to-peer learning is amplified by emerging technologies that shape the collective nature of participation with those new media" (pg 50).

As it will be difficult to sum up the book and relate it to online tools and games, I will stick my relation to the book to using social tools, such as Blogs, in the classroom to increase learning.  

As I was reading the book I was wondering how to use new media forms to increase peer-to-peer learning.  Blogs would be a great example and the book talks about how blogs give students the opportunity to become part of a collective that is greater than themselves and they give students the opportunity to play with new ideas and refine them through beginning conversations around ideas that are important for the learner.  

"Because a person's blog is subject to revision by others, the influence of the collective can powerfully and meaningfully shape the blogger's view of the world, just as the blogger at the same time can shape the collective" (pg 66).

This is my first blog that I have done for a class and I would have to say that I really like how the information and reflections on my blog have helped me in my learning process.  I look forward to seeing others comments about some of the tools that are reviewed and I am constantly learning.  I am looking forward to implementing blogs in my future classes.  I will keep you updated about how that goes.  
 
I began reading the book to tie in the tools that have been reviewed in this blog with learning.  After all, I truly believe that it is not about the technology.  I realize that this blog may look as though online learning is all about the technology.  I wanted to use the following quote from the book as perhaps a disclaimer for this blog to suggest that it really is not just about technology:  


"We don't mean to suggest that every interaction with the new media creates a learning environment.  Rather, we suggest that each collective has the potential to make learning fun and easy to allow people to follow their desires and passions in productive and fruitful ways"  (pg 72).


Thomas and Seely sited a study comparing Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica.  The study found that they were equally accurate.  That piece of knowledge should calm the parents or teachers who still view Wikipedia as an evil source of information.  Score a thumbs up for Wikipedia.

Thomas and Seely also address how students learn through play and imagination.  "As children encounter new places, people, and ideas, they use play and imagination to cope with the massive influx of information they receive" (pg 47). 

I know that I haven’t done the book justice through this brief discussion.  The book dives much deeper into playing, how gamers learn through experimentation, and how through knowing, making, and playing can change our culture of learning.  So to try to do some justice to the book, I would invite anyone to please add comments about how you use online games in your classroom to enhance learning and to please add comments about your view points on this book. 

Perhaps to add a bit of the content from the book that I have left out, I will leave you with some of my favorite quotes from the book:

• In a world of near-constant flux, play becomes a strategy for embracing change, rather than a way for growing out of it (pg 48).
  
• In the new culture of learning, the classroom as a model is replaced by learning environments in which digital media provide access to a rich source of information and play, and the processes that occur within those environments are integral to the results (pg 37-38).
  
• For most of the twentieth century our educational system has been built on the assumption that teaching is necessary for learning to occur (pg 34).
  
• In blogging authorship is transformed in a way that recognizes the participation of others as fundamental to the process.  A blogger is not writing to an audience; he is facilitating the construction of an interpretive community (pg 66).

Khan Academy

Khan Academy

Thumbs up for a plethora of math videos.

The Khan academy is a website that offers 2463 videos to date that explain math concepts from K-12 and beyond.  They do also have some videos for Biology and History.  The program will allow you to view all of the videos without ever having to log in; however, if you want to complete the practice questions and keep track of your progress or your students, you will need to sign up.  In order to sign up you need to have either a Facebook account or a Google account.  If you have either of those then signing in to the site is a very simple process.  

Once a student logs in they will have to add their parent or teacher as their coach.  This is what will allow a teacher to keep track of the students progress.  The coach can then see how much time the student has spent on the program, which exercises the student has completed along with which ones the student has gotten right or wrong with the time it took to complete the exercise.  The student can earn badges from as simple as watching 30 minutes of video to master badges.  As the students work through exercises or watch videos they earn Energy Points which are intended to keep the students motivated to keep working on the site.  

I went through my trial run today and I made my husband sign up and make me his coach.  My husband is a middle years teacher and math coach.  I am sure the last thing that he wanted to do on his summer holidays is to be testing out some math site for me.  But alas, he complied.  As I am writing he is working on math questions on the site and watching videos.  He keeps shouting out every time he earns another badge.  He is getting right into the program and I keep asking him if it is awesome, his reply is "It's o.k.".  When I probed him further he indicated that it is very old school.  For example when it has subtracting a negative number the video explains to just turn it into a positive because they cancel each other out.  Whereas that might be true, there is no explanation as to why.  With our division moving into the Math Makes Sense program where it looks at math problems from a number of different views and it seeks to build a conceptual understanding rather than just procedural.  This is where the Khan Academy falls short. 

 Recommendations for use of Khan Academy:

• When wanting to give students an opportunity for drill and practice.
• For students who find drill and practice rewarding (I would be one of these students, perhaps not so much my husband)
• For students who already have a conceptual understanding of a concept and just need reinforcement.
• A good tool to increase your speed with math facts (there are the speed badges that would help to motivate students)
• Good home use to review and reinforce the procedural component of a concept.
• To get an idea where students are struggling through use of the Dashboard.  
• For distance learning students so that the teacher can monitor the practice questions that are being completed.  

Drawbacks of the Khan Academy:

• Does not provide for conceptual learning.
• Some videos are lacking detail or key concepts are missing from some of the videos.
• The videos aren't high interest and are fairly long to keep the viewers attention. 
• Only multiple choice questions.

Benefits of the Khan Academy:

• Good opportunity for students to practice concepts.
• Very comprehensive list of math videos. 
• The badge and energy points system can be a useful motivator for many students.
• Good question bank.
• Too many question answers where e) none of the above.

Check out others reviews of Khan Academy:

• The Blog on the site gives a lot of perspective other teachers and students using the program.   http://www.khanacademy.org/about/blog
• http://www.theweblogreview.com/review/3491/
• http://www.commonsensemedia.org/website-reviews/khan-academy
  

 

Edmodo

Thumbs way, way, up!

Edmodo

"What is Edmodo?

At Edmodo, we have two goals:

1. Create social media tools that help teachers engage students and allow students to reach their potential.
2. Make sure every school in the world has access to them.

Edmodo is a free and secure social learning network for teachers, students and schools. Edmodo provides classrooms a safe and easy way to connect and collaborate, offering a real-time platform to exchange ideas, share content, and access homework, grades and school notices.

Accessible online and from any mobile device via free smart phone applications, Edmodo has grown from a teacher tool into a district-wide resource as word of the free online service spreads through schools around the world."


I loved this tool!  It was easy to use, had a start up video that explained what it was suppose to do, and it had good support.  This is a tool that teachers would use to manage their classrooms online.  As I started using it I realized that it is a tool similar to Moodle or Blackboard.  As such I was skeptical to even proceed forward in looking at this resource because our school division uses Moodle and I wouldn't want to confuse or present too many tools in one division that do the same job.

Having said that, I think that Edmodo has some features that Moodle just does not offer.  Edmodo is easy to use and doesn't have a ton of features, just the basic ones making it easy to use.  The best feature by far is the parent communication code.  Each student account has a parent code that goes with it that a parent can then use to log in and check up on their child.  If they have multiple children they will be able to monitor all of their children's classes with the codes provided for each one. Moodle doesn't have this feature and Blackboard only let you be an 'observer' for one child.

On Edmodo you can post and grade assignments, include polls, e-mail students and teachers privately, and provide links and upload documents to support the class.  The parents, students, and teachers can choose to have their alerts sent to them through their e-mail or through text messages.  

The other cool feature of Edmodo is that it is an open source so you can connect to other communities throughout the world.  As I was scrolling through the communities I signed up to follow the Computer Technology and Creative Arts communities.

Benefits:

• Free
• The teacher can set up multiple classes easily
• The teacher can set up multiple groups easily
• Parents can check in to see how their student is progressing
• Parents, teachers, and students can choose how they want to be notified: e-mail or text
• Teachers and students can easily blog
• No advertising on the site
• Easy to post, grade, and submit assignments.
• There is opportunity to join other educational communities.

Drawbacks:

• May be similar to what your division is already using and as a result teachers and students may not want to use another learning management system.
• Is not fully functional for a full distance learning program as everything is presented in blog form.  It is meant to more support a blended or face to face teaching program.

Other Reviews of Edmodo:
http://www.appappeal.com/app/edmodo/

http://edjudo.com/edmodo-review-social-networking-for-teachers-and-students.html

Glogster

Until further trials can be done.

Glogster

"Glogster EDU is the leading global education platform for the creative expression of knowledge and skills in the classroom and beyond.  We empower educators and students with the technology to create GLOGS - online multimedia posters - with text, photos, videos, graphics, sounds, drawings, data attachments and more"

Glogster is an online tool for creating posters.  The posters can contain videos, podcasts, links to the internet, and personalized pictures, to name a few.  I signed up for the free EDU basic account that allows you to sign up 50 students under your account.  In order to sign up for the Premium account, which allows you to sign up 200 students per year, you would have to pay an additional $99 per year.

Perhaps the Premium account would be better, after all, with the free account there were many buttons that looked like options, like the Draw or Data option, where if you clicked on them it didn't tell you that you couldn't access it with your account it just, rather annoyingly,  kept leading you back to the Premium page where you could purchase the premium package. 

Benefits:

• Allows you to create an online poster that you can add multimedia to, such as videos and pod-casts.
• Nice alternative to the traditional collage poster.
• Relatively simple drag and drop features (although I couldn't always get the video option to work).
• EDU basic is free

Drawbacks:

• Needs some video tutorials that would get a person started.
• It is a social network where others can comment on their posters.  As long as they are in the EDU account that you set up for them there is a low risk of them being exposed to inappropriate material, but on the main site (not the EDU part) the glogs are open for anyone to create and many of the glogs are inappropriate or do contain some nudity (even though they are not suppose to).  
• Being a social network site could take away from the learning and have the students distracted from the task at hand.  
• I wasn't able to get all the video's that I wanted linked and there seemed to be a huge lack of support or resources to be able to aid a person with any troubles or errors that may occur along the way.
• There wasn't a search button to be able to search others glogs.  For example if I wanted to search if there were other glogs on hair that wasn't an option.

Thumbs up or Thumbs down:
 Before I would be able to give this site a thumbs up I would have to do a few small trials with it.  For now it is a thumbs down.  There seemed to be too many glitches and lack of support for me to completely support this tool.  It is a great idea and perhaps the Premium $99 version is better, but the basic left me a bit wanting in terms of all that it promised to be able to do.


Others reviews of Glogster:
http://www.commonsensemedia.org/website-reviews/glogster
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-9840488-2.html
http://www.appappeal.com/app/glogster/


As always I have created a project with the tool.  This one is about the layers of the hair.  The video link at the bottom doesn't work.  That was the trouble I was having with attaching video.  ENJOY!

The fact that it may not load properly with the embed function is another one of my pet peeves about this site.  Just in case here is the web link: http://biemrac.edu.glogster.com/layers-of-hair/

Toondoo

Toondoo

The next tool that I am evaluating is Toondoo.

“Toondoo is a wacky way to get creative with comics.  Create! Share! Embed them in blogs!”

www.toondoo.com

Upon first site it was clear that this site was not inviting me in as an educator.  A with the previous games/tools that I have evaluated, they all had some sort of pitch on the main page to describe how I could use their tool in an educational setting.  This was not the case for Toondoo.  Never the less I was drawn to this program because my daughter had used it in grade 5 and I was trying to find something similar to Bubble Dialogue that was recommended in the current text that I am reading “Psychology of Learning for Instruction”.  Since Bubble Dialogue didn’t seem to be in current existence I went for a name that I was familiar with.  Thus, we are arriving at Toondoo.

General Thoughts:

I didn't find this the easiest tool to use.  There were no quick help video tutorials walking you through the main parts of the program.  There is a help wikki link but I didn't find it particularly helpful, and as will all programs like this I did find some very inappropriate comic strips that I wouldn't be able to control if the students decided to view them.  It also wasn't the the fastest program to load, so perhaps if many students were trying to access this site at the same time there may be some issues with bandwidth.

Thumbs up or Thumbs down
For now I will give the site a thumbs up for the potential learning benefits of this type of program.  But in the future I might have to reverse my decision if I find a more user friendly comic strip generator. 

Possible Benefits: 

 In any case, I really wanted to try to use a program like this for the benefits suggested in the text I referenced above:

• allows students to create conversations and thoughts that might not be said out loud
• allows students to look at a situation from multiple perspectives
• facilitates literacy

Jones, Price, and Shelby did a study on "a comparative study of how a group of children with emotional and behavioural difficulties and children who attend a mainstream school use Bubble Dialogue to express themselves and the strategies used by the children to resolve interpersonal conflicts".  Again, here I am using Toondoo and Bubble Dialogue as though they do the same task.

Rajendran and Mitchell also did a study on the use of Bubble Dialogue with students with Asperger's syndrome to look at social functioning and cognitive performance as well as assessing their quality of communication.  They found that using Bubble Dialogue offered the students an opportunity to slow down and think about their communication and revise and change as needed.

"The results from this study suggest that future research needs to be directed at developing experiential interventions, and investigating their efficacy in improving social understanding in individuals with Asperger's syndrome. Furthermore, the use of computer software, like Bubble Dialogue, provides an engaging and humanistic way of facilitating this.." (Rajendran and Mitchell, 2000, pg 205)

Alas, I created a toondoo book to see how this program might work in a Psychology 20 class when exploring the different perspectives of the various social psychologists.  

And please do let me know if you know of a program similar to Toondoo that is a bit easier to use.

biemrac

Freudian Perspective by biemrac | Make your own at www.toondoo.com


References:

www.toondoo.com

Exploring children’s responses to interpersonal conflict using bubble dialogue in a mainstream and EBD school:  Ann Jones, Emma Price and Carolyn Selby

Computers & Education
Volume 30, Issues 1-2 , January 1998, Pages 67-74

---

doi:10.1016/S0360-1315(97)00081-X

Computer mediated interaction in Asperger's syndrome: the
Bubble Dialogue program:  Gnanathusharan Rajendran*, Peter Mitchell

https://wiki.inf.ed.ac.uk/twiki/pub/ECHOES/MultiModalInterfaces/Rajendran2000.pdf

Driscoll, M. P., 2005, Psychology of Learning for  Instruction, Pearson Education, Inc.

Animoto in the Classroom

This post is dedicated to Animoto and it's uses in the classroom.

animoto.com

I was interested in Animoto when another colleague of mine was thinking about using it in her dance class with elementary students.  She wasn't sure how engaged, especially the boys would be, in a dance unit, so she toyed with the idea of having the kids take pictures of very strategic steps in a dance that they were to learn and then animate the pictures through Animoto to get the pictures to come to life.

My interpretation of her description was that it would move one picture into the next in a sequence that would look more like a stop motion video with simple transitions.  In the end she never did use Animoto and the kids performed their dance in person.  Never the less, my interest was peeked about this Animoto tool.

Animoto is a tool that claims to "Enhance your digital classroom with Animoto, the perfect tool for creating videos and presentations. It takes just minutes to create a video which can bring your lessons to life."  The site provides some examples of how educators can use it in the classroom.  I watched a portion of a video entitled Funky Function Notation  that in my opinion was information/music overload.  It was hard to process the information being given through the loud music and constant movement of the screen.  I know they were using this one as a good example but I would rather have said it was a bad example of how to use Animoto in the classroom.

Again on the same page was an example of going through the alphabet.  I suppose that it would depend on how or why this video was being used as to whether I would have sited it as a good example or not.  If the students made all the representations of the letters and Animoto was used to highlight the students work, then I thought it was a great idea.  If the video was suppose to reinforce the alphabet then I would have to give it a pass.  Again, too much competing information for the senses, cognitive overload happened quick.

In order to experience this tool first hand, I gave a video a try.  I took pictures from a students work in a Cosmetology 10 class and put them into a video.

Positives:

• The video was relatively easy to create
• It was free

Negatives:

•  I would have liked to have seen a preview of the video before the final creation of the video.  
• When adding text you have a 22 character limit for the title and a 30 character limit for the subtitle, so you have to be quick and to the point when highlighting key points.  
• I couldn't find how to choose the transitions which may be a positive for the simplicity of the video and may keep the students focused on the task at hand rather than getting lost in all the bells and whistles.  Still I would have liked to have had a bit more control in the transition process.  
• The music was often too loud and distracting (maybe I am too old) 
• With the transitions, music, and speed of movement, there are often times too many items competing for attention leading to cognitive overload.
• The free version is limited to 30 seconds.

How would I recommend using it?

• For an quick easy presentation of photos taken in class
• As a showcase of students work
• For students to highlight important ideas and pictures from a specific topic.

Below is the Animoto video that I put together from a students pictures for an assignment in Cosmetology 10.

Look for future blogs about game makers as well as some definitions.  I seem to be lost in the language as I look through online games.  I am wondering:  Do you need a PhD to understand what Web 2.0 means?  I will be addressing that topic in future blogs as well.

Voki

For my first Online Tool that I have chosen I am looking at how to use Voki in the classroom.

http://www.voki.com/




Voki is a free online tool that allows a person to choose an avatar and create a voice for the avatar. One can create a voice either by recording their own voice, uploading a voice previously recorded, in something like audacity, or by using the text to speech option. You are however, limited to a 60 second recording.

Voki claims to be able to:

• Motivate students to participate
• Improve message comprehension
• Introduce technology in the classroom
• Explore Voki as an effective language tool
• Inspire and get inspired by other teachers

In terms of  following through on the above claims, I do think that Voki could motivate students to participate in the way that it can provide anonymity for the student.  If a student could put together and deliver a speech through Voki, then I see this as being very beneficial for the student who has anxiety about public speeches.  I am sure that it would depend on the teacher as to whether this would count for their mandatory public speech or not, but I am sure there would be some teachers who would be willing to let anxious students use it.

In order to improve message comprehension, I can see it as a valuable tool to have students type out a specific text and then be able to hear the message played back to them.  A student may be better able to catch their grammatical errors better when hearing their typed text played back to them.

As far as this being able to introduce technology into the classroom, I am not a big fan of incorporating technology (perhaps a better phrase would be computer games or tools) just for the sake of introducing technology.  So if a teachers main purpose was to incorporate Voki into their class so that they could put a check mark beside the 'uses technology in the classroom' I would not be super impressed.  It is about the teaching and not the tool.  Having said that, on the site there are a number of examples from teachers, including lesson plans, that will help a teacher use this tool to enhance their teaching, not just for the sake of incorporating technology, which would certainly touch on the inspire and be inspired by other teachers claim that Voki makes.

Some areas that I can see teachers using voki is for: unit or lesson introductions, as this would create more interest especially in an online classroom, learning how to express yourself, practicing keyboard skills including computer skill such as copy and paste, and for learning/practicing a second language.
In my exploration of the Voki site I was able to create a Voki avatar and embed it into this blog with ease.  I can certainly see the benefit of this tool to enhance delivery of content or units in my online classes.  I am curious how much bandwidth and internet speed would be a problem for students trying to watch the Voki especially if trying to use it with an entire class.

Here is a few good sites to see student examples:

Voki Talking Avatars
Cybraryman
Student Reflection Using Voki

802 Online Games/Tools to Enhance Learning

I will be doing a blog on internet tools/games that can be used in an online class.  It will be a bit of an evaluation/critique of games/tools that can be used in the online classroom through exploration.  I would likely choose 6-12 tools perhaps one or two each week.  I would like to do this because I never seem to have the time to experiment or evaluate some of the cool tools that are out there that can make online learning fun/enriching/better...  I would really like to do this one and would welcome any input from those of you who are already using the tools that I will be exploring or if you have suggestions for tools/games for me to explore, as I would love to draw on others experience.