Month: April 2011

Disappearing Voki scenes

Disappearing Voki scenes

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Several Voki educators have reported “disappearing Voki scenes” recently. The scenario goes something like this:

You planned a great lesson using Voki in your classroom. Come class time, you have all of your students log on and create their Voki scenes, and then save them. Or, perhaps you had your students log on from home and create a Voki as part of a homework assignment.

You’re excited to see what they came up with. So, you log in to check their Vokis, and nothing! All (or most) of the Voki scenes that should be in your account, aren’t! What happened??

What happened
Well, we found out that this was due to special characters being used in the Voki titles. The less-than and greater-than characters (<, >) were actually causing all (or most) of the saved Voki scenes to disappear! (Note: although you could not see them, your saved Vokis are always saved in your account…)

What we’re doing about it
We’re happy to say that this issue has been resolved. When you log in to your account, you should see all of your scenes (if you don’t make sure to clear your browser’s cache and then refresh). Any new Voki scenes that are created can have the less-than and greater-than characters in the title. For the existing Voki scenes, we have replaced those characters with a space. So, a scene named “I just ❤ this” is now named “I just  3 this” – you can go back and rename these scenes however you like.

If you have any questions or concerns, please leave a comment or drop us a line in the Teacher’s Corner.

Interviews with Educators | Lisa Mims

Interviews with Educators | Lisa Mims

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Welcome to another edition of Voki Interviews with Educators. This time, we have a very creative interview with Lisa Mims. Lisa created a PowerPoint interview about her use of Voki.

Some of Lisa’s goals using Voki are

  1. To engage her students in the classroom
  2. To instill a love for learning, and
  3. To integrate new technology into her classroom in order to promote critical thinking.

Check out her interview in this brief presentation!

Interview:

Links:

Check out Lisa’s blog: Diary of a Public School Teacher

Follow Lisa on Twitter: http://twitter.com/BriteEyes49

Want to be interviewed for this section? Send us a note and a link to your blog/ twitter: submit@voki.com.

What’s with Ads on Voki?

What’s with Ads on Voki?

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So you logged on to your favorite site this morning (no, not Facebook) only to notice an ad where there was none before. “What’s with the ad?” you exclaimed. We’d like to take a minute to explain exactly why the new ad is there.

Then. As many of our “old school” Voki users will remember, we made the decision to stop showing those small ads within Voki scenes sometime in 2010. This decision was based 100% on the requests we received from our users. Many educators and parents didn’t want their students/ kids exposed to ads while viewing a Voki scene.

Since then, we have not shown any ads within Voki scenes, and our users have responded very positively! In fact, we have never seen as many Voki signups as we’ve seen lately. We’ve received a lot of positive feedback and “Voki love.” Yet, while we love the love, and we’re proud to offer Voki as a free and useful service, “love don’t pay the bills.”

Now. If you’ve visited http://www.voki.com recently, you may have noticed something new. Instead of just the normal SitePal “tower” ad on the right (which links to our sister site, www.sitepal.com), you’ll now see a second ad (or ads) on the left side of the page. These ads are being served by Google.

Why the ads? Our primary goal is to keep Voki as a free service for all education and non-profit individuals and groups. To do this, we need to begin to cover the costs of development, maintenance, and hosting. Hence, the ads are there to help keep Voki free for all. More importantly for many of our users, this is a way to keep the ads out of the Voki scenes.

Can I help? Sure, just keep on using Voki like you always have, and spread the word! If you see an ad that interests you, feel free to click on it (note – you can right click and select “open in new window/ tab” if you’d like to keep your Voki window intact).

A note on ad content: We have attempted to block certain types of ads from showing – anything that we believe is inappropriate for kids, really. If you come across an ad that you believe is unsuitable for youngsters, feel free to email us (feedback@voki.com) the website’s name and we’ll consider blocking the site.