Voki in the class

Voki

This tool is excellent to work on listening and oral skills. Here are some ideas to use this great resource in your classrooms.

1) Listening exercise.

Go to this link: 

http://www.voki.com/pickup.php?scid=9526044&height=267&width=200

Here you will find a voki avatar that talks about food. This exercise is for beginners, it can be adapt for any level.

Give the students the following worksheet and play the avatar 2 times or more. The first time, the students only have to listen and the second time, they have to work on the worksheet. 

Worksheet:

Fill in the blanks.

Isn’t food ____________________ greatest pleasures? Do you know anyone who doesn’t like food? I don’t. There ____________________ delicious food in the world. You ____________________ whole lifetime eating a different dish every day. What’s the tastiest food in the world? This ____________________ difficult question to answer. My taste in food keeps changing. Sometimes my favorite is a dessert, but then I ____________________ and go for a spicy curry. It’s great that countries have so many different dishes. Do ____________________ national dish is best? Nowadays we have to be careful ____________________ eat. Fast food is not good for us.

This is just one idea of listening, but with this same text you can do more listening tasks or why not writing or speaking tasks? 

2) Pronunciation tasks.

You as a professor can be very creative with this program. This can be a very useful tool for a pronunciation teacher. An idea is to work with  identification  of sounds (minimal pairs) using a text or just the words. 

3) Other ideas.

You can use this program to introduce a topic to the class, to begin a discussion in the class by introducing a topic and then a question or something like that, and to make the students present a biography after investigating for example about a singer, president, or actor. Students can also introduce themselves in the first class of a course using this program in class, also, they can present a writing (short story, poem) to the class after the whole process of writing.