Voki Avatars

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).