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Title slide: How to make a Voki (No narration) Introduction The narrated introduction to this screencast will be done by using a Voki avatar or by Erin Gough. Avatars voice Hello. I am an avatar and I want to welcome you to the application Voki. Voki is a Web 2.0 application that can be easily used in the classroom as to engage students. Whether you are introducing a new concept or providing instructions for a task, Voki offers a unique approach that will pique the interest of every 21st century student. Voki can also serve as an educational tool by providing students a resource that will present information for them. Can you imagine the impact this will have on not only our ELL students and those with disabilities, but also our timid students? Instead of experiencing anxiety and embarrassment while trying to present in front of their classmates, students can utilize a Voki to communicate for them.

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Following the screencast introduction by the Voki avatar in scene 2; scene 3 will begin by the narrator introducing herself and launching onto the internet using Google Chrome. Hello, I am Erin Gough and that introduction was done using the Web 2.0 presentation application called Voki. This screencast was created to teach you just how easy it is to design your own avatars for you or your students through this application. Ill also discuss some different ways that it can be used in your classroom. Lets get started. We obviously have to be able to connect to the internet, and in this particular screencast, well be doing this using the web-browser Google-Chrome.

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Once Google Chrome has been loaded, the narrator, will then type in the website www.voki.com into the browser window. After weve connected to the internet via Chrome, well then type www.voki.com into the web-browser window. It comes up fairly quickly, and were ready to go.

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With the Voki webpage uploaded, the narrator will then proceed through the step-bystep registration process of the Voki application. In order for us to use Voki, we dont actually have to register or create any type of account, however if we dont do this, we are unable to save or use what weve created more than onceso, using our mouse, well move our curser up to the button that says Register and press. This is located up in the right-hand corner of the webpage, next to the button Login. The login button will be used later on when we actually have an account. In order to register, well need to enter our first and last names, a valid email address (I just use my school email address since this is where I do the majority of my work), and create a user name and password.

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After registering, the narrator will click on the create tab to begin the Voki avatar creation process. The narrator will proceed to introduce the various characters, their customizations, and backgrounds. Once registered, were now ready to get started exploring and creating our on Voki avatar. Before we begin, if we look to the top of the webpage, we see that there are several tabs; Create, My Voki, Learn, Lesson Plans, Products, and Pricing. The Create tab is pretty self-explanatory. This is the one well use to actually make our avatar. The My Voki tab will be used in order to access previous Vokis weve created. The Lesson Plans tab is an interesting portion of the website that allows us to look at various lesson plans which other teachers have used in Voki applications. Finally, the Products and Pricing tabs will show the various products and pricing that Voki presents to us. For our purposes today, we will only show how to create and save a Voki.

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Creation of the avatar. So, well move the cursor to the Create tab and press. Youll notice that immediately an avatar appears. (Different avatars will appear each time we activate this tab). To the right of the avatar are six boxesThese boxes will help us to create our avatar. The top box holds the customization tools for our avatar. These include head type, clothing, and accessories.

After we choose the head type, youll notice there are several categories that include fantasy, classic, and cartoons. For today, I am going to select classic and click on a female to represent myself. Then I will choose what type of hair I want my avatar to have. Ill also be able to adjust the color of my eyes, shade of skin, width of nose, mouth, etc. This feature is unique to Voki in that it allows the user to personalize the avatar even to the point to reflecting ones self persona. These modifications are found underneath the avatar under the tabs color, and tweak. Probably the next step would be to choose clothes for the avatar weve created. Again, there are sub-categories here just like there were for the head. These include sports, casual clothes, costumes, etc. Well choose sports. We can now begin to accessorize our Avatar using the Bling button. This will allow us to give the Avatar glasses, sunglasses, jewelry, etc. The bling choices will change depending on the type of avatar we choose. Once we have all that done, if we move the cursor to the bottom of the customization square, well scroll over the Done button and well be ready to give our avatar a voice. Oops, I almost forgotVoki also allows us to pick the color or rather theme of how we want our Voki to look. Once again if we move our cursor to the Players button and press, well see many different colors from which to choose.

Not only can we choose the theme, we also have lots of choices for backgrounds that we may want to use. Again, if we scroll to the background button and push, we are given a wide variety of different and interesting backgrounds for the avatar.

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Giving the avatar a voice. Nowweve got everything ready to go with the exception of giving our avatar a voice. This can be done in several ways. Voki allows us to use typed words which will then be spoken by our avatar or, we can also record our voice through either a microphone or through the use of a phone. Additionally, we can upload a document from our computer which will allow us yet another way to give our

Voki a voice. These multiple formats can offer our students various opportunities to communicate effectively through their Avatar. For today, lets go ahead and use the Type Your Text format. I am going to simply insert a greeting for my students welcoming them to class and provide them with opening instructions.

Once we are finished inserting our text, youll notice we can also personalize our Avatars voice. When selecting the voice for our Avatar, Voki offers choices of both male and female, as well as various accents and languages such as; English with American, Scottish, Australian, Irish, and Indian accents. Several other languages are also available such as Chinese, German, and French just to name a few. For today well choose English/American with a female voice in order to match the Avatar to myself. Well thats about it. All thats left is to scroll down to the Publish button, press and follow the directions. Publishing our voki will allow us to get either a web-link or an embed code to place it on a website. Credit Slide

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