Interesting tools to include in our lessons

Today I bring you Voki an incredible tool that not only can be used as entertainment but also for educational ends. This application allows users to create their own talking character, customize it to look like historical figures, cartoons, animals, and even yourself!

You can give this avatar a voice by recording with a microphone, typing the message you would like to share, or uploading an audio file. Voki characters can be emailed, shared on social media, and embedded on websites! Plus, it is user friendly and it only takes a few minutes to follow the steps.

If you are looking for a twist in your classroom routines, this tool will help you empower activities for your students and break the mould. They can create their own avatars and you can give instructions and assignments in a completely different way. Students will definitely enjoy creating their character and personalizing it to resemble their appearance, and perhaps can help to refresh the activity repertoire they are used to working with.

Here is my Voki, hope you like it!

Another application that we have been working with in ECO II is Wordle, in which you can generate “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends. However, saving your wordle in the gallery is not the smartest thing to do, since the amount of "wordles" is overwhelming and yours is bound to get lost any time soon. It is always a better choice to cut it and paste it on "paint" and then you have it among your files.

Despite being a rather simple tool, I think it does wonders when it comes to working with grammar, it also reinforces vocabulary, syntax and lexis. It adds a new dimention to the well-known "word order" found in many books that may result a bit dull. Students have the opportunity to create their own wordles without being limited to what they see on the books and this is advantageous for their autonomy and self-steem.

Let's see if you can tackle my wordle, it is about a popular saying... that is the only hint you will get!