Wow... this is fun! I have created my first Voki Avatar and it was an awesome experience - but also a great time waster. But in saying that I have already experimented using a Voki for an up-comming assignment and upon showing my colleagues they were quite impressed. I believe that avatars can be a useful tool to engage students in the e-learning world. For example, an avatar can be used for a hook for introducing a topic to the students for an electronic based assignment. The vibrant colours, moving images and speach instead of text all relate to engaging the learner. As suggested by The Abilene Christian University, (2000) active Learning Online the input from multiple sources through multiple senses such hearing, seeing, feeling can make learning effective. With that in mind the student can design their own appropriate avatar that is relevant to their topic. With the relevant avatar designed, it can relay information to the viewer which gets engaged with the topic because of the image and sounds comming from it. This can be effective with today's learner as most are considered digital natives. Digital natives are used to recieveing information fast and prefer to see graphics instead of text as stated by Marc Prensky (2001).
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Your Voki Looks good. Looks a bit familia lol. Hope you are learning heaps in this course. Keep up the good work.
ReplyDeleteLike you I could of played around creating voki's all afternoon. If you ever get the opportunity have a look at the mathaletics program. Avatars are used as an incentive to earn credits (by solving math tasks). The more credits you earn the more accessories are available to the user. It is a great engaging and motivating tool to encourage students to practice and improve math skills.
ReplyDeletePhil, avatars can be a great time waster, but it would be a great hook for a lesson, and students will be interested and engaged. Do you know of any tools similar to an avatar which allows for longer speaking/instruction time? your blog is looking great, keep up the good work.
ReplyDelete@ Aaron; I am glad you liked my avatar. He is actually my Uncle from a small country that starts with a "K", ...... I can't think of it now, it's on the tip of my tounge.
ReplyDelete@ Natasha; Thanks for the link to mathaletics, it was very exciting and I think it would be a good tool to use in my classroom.
@ Bronte; Yes they can be a great time waster. I tried not to spend too much time on it. Instead I used it for the engaging tool on the start of my digital gaming presentation. I think it was a great start to a great presentation.
It was an excellent engaging tool for the start of your presentation. I think the essences in teaching is to grasp students attention right from the being of a learning experience and you certainly accomplish that well, because their was a lot of talk about the Voki and where can we find one? I was also think your presentation was very informative and may benefit people doing this course as well, hence I will now be adding digital gaming as a technology to my blog.
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