Voki.com

Description: “Voki is a free service that allows you to create personalized speaking avatars and use them on your blog, profile, and in email messages.”

This is a fun tool for teachers to grab the attention of students and allow the students to listen rather than just read. This can also be a supplement, just another way, for teachers to give information to their students. Since we know that students learn in different ways, you can take advantage of a Voki’s audio feature.

It’s free to sign up and you can create multiple avatars. You can either use a microphone and speak for 1 minute or type in text, which will be translated into a “computer voice” (there are even different accents!). It gives you various types of embeddable code which allows you to use the Voki in your Moodle course.

This resource has been a big hit in our summer Moodle trainings. Spanish teachers like it because they can talk or type in Spanish. Some teachers have made a “Welcome” message Voki avatar and put it in their summary section on their course homepage. Some teachers have embedded it within a “compose a web page”. If your students have emails, they can sign up for a free account and even create their own! Tired of taking class time for oral exams? or you just want a fun, different way for students to do an assignment? They create a Voki and hand it in via Moodle!

Voicethread.com

Description: “A VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images, documents, and videos and allows people to navigate pages and leave comments in 5 ways – using voice (with a mic or telephone), text, audio file, or video (via a webcam). Share a VoiceThread with friends, students, and colleagues for them to record comments too.”

Check out Easy Moodle Embedding for more information

Other Resources

• MathTV.com – Like YouTube, but with all Math videos – great quality.
• TeacherTube – Like YouTube, but for the educational world. A great site that a lot of our teachers like to use. Embeddable code is available to copy/paste into Moodle.
• YouTube – Although it contains some totally useless content, there are quality videos here. Embeddable code is available to copy/paste into Moodle. You can also choose to not have the “related videos” show up in the embedded video – which is good for because students can not click on it and go to the actual YouTube site.
• HowStuffWorks.com – “A wholly owned subsidiary of Discovery Communications, is the award-winning source of credible, unbiased, and easy-to-understand explanations of how the world actually works.” [read more] Contains quality videos on all topics. Unlike YouTube, you won’t have to worry about students watching inappropriate videos because they all look educational and credible.