Avatar is More Than a Blockbuster Movie!

Official Avatar Movie

When I first heard the term avatar used in the context of teaching and ICT, I couldn’t help but mentally picture the Na'vi - blue alien-like creatures, bounding from tree to tree in the rainforests of Pandora. However, avatars are more than characters in James Cameron’s latest blockbuster movie. In fact, they can be a highly effective and creative digital tool for learning managers. This post discusses the advantages and uses of avatars in teaching, with specific reference to ‘voki’ – an online publishing tool for creating avatars.

So what exactly is a voki and how can they be used in teaching?

A voki is a personalisable cartoon avatar which enables users to create a character/ audio player and express themselves on the web using a customised message (Pearce & Bass, 2008, p. 143). Vokis are one of many ‘plug-ins’ available to learning managers for use on the web (be it on a blog, in an email message, on a site profile, or on an online learning site such as moodle). The voki webiste can be accessed at http://www.voki.com/. Once you sign up to voki, you can begin creating a basic animated voki character for free (or explore other paid options such as 'site pal' - more advanced talking characters for websites).

The capabilities of voki are such, that you can customise a voki to suit your preferences or teaching topic. A voki’s; character style, player 'skin,' facial features, background, skin, hair, makeup, voice, ‘bling,’ clothes, can all be modified (as shown in the screen shot below).

A unique capability of voki, is that you can customise the character’s audio message, using either a microphone (to record up to sixty seconds of your own voice) or the text to speech feature on the voki website. Once the voki character is complete, a HTML code is generated and can be embeded in your webpage for the world to see (and play!).

The customisable and animated nature of vokis appeals to upper primary students and teenagers, who undeniably enjoy experimenting with new technologies. Vokis can be used by students to personalise their work and express themselves, for example by creating a voki reflective of themselves or their personality to their blog as a welcome message. The fun, novel of nature of vokis make them perfect for engaging students through active learning and for motivating them to learn. Given what we know about multiple literacies and learning styles, vokis are also a great way to engage both auditory and visual learners and are thus pedagogically justified.

As my patriotic voki friend from the US Army mentioned above, vokis can also be used by teachers to enhance lessons and engage learners. For instance, teachers could employ vokis on a moodle site or a teacher administered (class or student) blog to introduce; a unit of work, topic or homework assignment.

Please press play on the voki below for an example of how a voki can be customised by learning managers to suit the topic they are teaching and introduce students to online material or a homework assignment. In the example given, Sarah Palin, introduces the topic of misrepresented quotes to an English class, beginning with her (famously misrepresented) statement "I can see Russia from my house." Further instructions and details could then be given in written format on the class site or blog. Students might be asked to research and discuss other quotes throughout history where the meaning intended was lost in translation. From this example, you can see how vokis can be customised to suit a topic and interest students in the topic from the outset with an attention grabbing introduction (or ‘hook’).