Hello Future Voki Ambassadors!

I wanted to share with you a big change in the Voki Ambassador program!

We’ve decided to make the Voki Ambassador program the type of program that you must re-apply to every school year. We feel this will keep engagement and energy high in the Voki Ambassador community!

Voki Ambassador Program Reboot

Ambassadors will receive:

• 5 90-day bundles to give away!
• Voki Swag will be based on frequency/quality of posts!
• Voki Swag will be sent out monthly–we have some really fun and valuable items for you and your students and are looking for your suggestions on more items!
• Support from me and Voki Tech team regarding any Voki problem/concern/question!

 If you’d like to apply for the 2015-2016 school year, it’s easy!

 Directions to apply:

Step 1: Like Voki Facebook Page

Step 2: Follow Voki Google+ Page

Step 3: Follow Voki Twitter Page

Step 4: Follow Voki Pinterest Page

Please answer all questions on this survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/vokiambassador

Once you’ve applied, you will get a response within a week from yours truly, letting you know if you’ve been chosen to join the Voki Ambassador team!

I can’t wait to work with all of you creative and driven teachers!

Until Next Time,

Heather 

Bio: Heather is the Community Manager at Voki and is part of the Marketing Team at Oddcast.  Before she joined the Voki team, she was a teacher for 7 years!  She has taught in charter, private, and public schools all across NYC. With her teacher hat on, she will create meaningful, engaging, and relevant content that can be implemented in your classrooms.  She is excited to partner with you to engage and educate your students! 

Hi Voki Users!

With the new school year also comes new ways in which we hope to provide value to you!

Once a month we will write a blog post that will highlight some excellent resources that we feel deserve the Voki Seal of Approval! The resource could be a blog, an Edtech tool, a video, or even a worksheet! If it provides value to teachers, it may show up in this blog post!

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1. Go Noodle

Go Noodle provides teachers and students with fun brain break activities to last the entire school year. Go Noodle’s physical activities allow students to channel their physical and emotional energy in a positive way.  All exercises are five minutes or less. It‘s a quick and super fun way to get your students back on track and focused at different points of the day! You should definitely check them out! Props to Go Noodle! You have received the Voki seal of approval!

2. Teaching With Terhune

We don’t think there is anything this teacher hasn’t thought of!  Do you need labels for….. EVERYTHING in your classroom? Mrs. Terhune has got you covered. She has binder spine labels for binders that store worksheets categorized by topic.  (e.g. frogs and apples) She has storage bin labels, pencil bin labels, table labels, seat labels.  She pretty much has a label for everything to help with classroom systems and organization. She has created a lesson plan template that will make you want to cry with excitement.  Most recently and possibly the coolest of all, are the aprons she created with the help of her mother. Now, this is not your ordinary apron. This is a teacher’s beautifully crafted tool belt that can be used to house pencils, incentives, pens, keys, expo marker– any object you tend to put down and lose throughout the course of a day in the classroom. Voki gives props to Mrs.Terhune!  You have received the Voki seal of approval!

3. IPad Apps For School

This site highlights valuable IPad applications for school teachers and school aged children. We love this site because it explains very simply how each app can be used and how to use it!  One App that we noticed (this is kind of a 2 –for-1)  is the Book Wizard app that is available via Ipad and IPhone.

This is a free  App that allows teachers to “scan a book’s barcode to quickly discover its Lexile measurement, grade level equivalent, and guided reading level.” You can also create book lists and share these book lists via e-mail, Pinterest and twitter. Pretty cool, huh?

Thank you Richard Byrne for sharing this amazing and time-saving app! Be sure to check out his other websites : Free Technology for Teachers and Android 4 Schools

Props to Richard Byrne and the Book Wizard App (created by Scholastic) you have received the Voki Seal of Approval!

Take some time to explore these “Monthly ‘Mazing” resources!

If you have any suggestions for our Monthly ‘Mazing Resources blog post, please drop us a line at feedback@voki.com

If you have an awesome resource we will highlight it here and shout you out for contributing!

Until Next Time,

Heather 

Bio: Heather is the Community Manager at Voki and is part of the Marketing Team at Oddcast.  Before she joined the Voki team, she was a teacher for 7 years!  She has taught in charter, private, and public schools all across NYC. With her teacher hat on, she will create meaningful, engaging, and relevant content that can be implemented in your classrooms.  She is excited to partner with you to engage and educate your students! 

 

Welcome Laura Fleming as  our Guest Blogger for this week! We are supremely happy to hear about how she has been able to give students the opportunity to speak in the classroom through Voki. 

Breaking down the barriers between students and teachers allows the opportunity for everyone to be learners learning together.  In addition to leveraging the distribution and proliferation of knowledge, students are empowered to take ownership of their own learning.  Engaging student voice allows them to have a significant degree of control and choice in what, when, and how they learn.  As educators, we cannot overlook how important it is for us to stop and really listen to the young people we work with everyday.  By embracing the voices of our learners, we all can transform education and make a difference in the world.  But what happens when your learners cannot express that voice?  This was the case at our school.

 

One of the teachers at my school was charged with teaching a public speaking class made up of developmentally disabled children.  She had taught many of those children for years and knew the best methods and tools to use with them to support their learning and allow for them to achieve success.  This teacher, however, was faced with an incredibly tough challenge.  Despite teaching one of the students in the class for 6 years, she had never heard this student speak.  It was at this time, I introduced the teacher to Voki.

 

At first glance to some, Voki may appear to be a ‘cool tool’ where students can create talking avatars.  For some students, that is the motivation and what they love best about the tool.  But in our case, it was Voki’s ability to give our student a voice, that made it such a powerful tool.  Our student was able to type text into Voki and then choose an avatar and a voice to speak the text for her.  She was able to tell us a story about an operation she had to fix her aorta and how she was brave even though it hurt and how important the comfort of her pet was in calming her nerves throughout the process.

 

Public speaking is an  important component to the educational process of special educations students with severe disabilities. Voki unlocked the silence of an eighteen year old student with selective mutism. Not only did we use Voki with that one student, we decided to use it with the entire class.  Students were able to speak or type their text, allowing for personalization and differentiation.

 

The simple experience of “making a toast” became life changing for one student. This student had not spoken in a classroom for the three years she had attended our high school. Using the Expanded Expressive Language tool she was able to fill in the graphic organizer to brainstorm her ideas of what she wanted to say.   With the help of her assistant she typed the text into Voki. Voki allowed her experience of making toast for her father’s birthday to come to life.  For the first time, other students and teachers were able to hear her words.  She was smiling during her entire presentation. She enjoyed picking her “person”, background and voice.  Voki was key to helping this student verbally express herself.

Thank you, Voki, for giving our students a voice.

Laura Fleming is a library media specialist at New Milford High School in New Milford, NJ.  She is also the author of Worlds of Making:  Best Practices for Establishing a Makerspace in Your School, published by Corwin Press.

Welcome Carie Hinkle to the Voki Ambassador Team!  You’re in for a special treat with this Techie Teacher’s Techniques ( gotta love alliteration!)  Take a seat, take some notes, and take heed of our guest blogger’s implementation of technology in the classroom!

Bringing Book Talks to Life With Voki

By Carie Hinkle

 

Are you searching for a way to breathe new life into student book talks?  Perhaps you want to create a way students can share what they’re reading that transcends the boundaries of your classroom walls.  Allow me to suggest Voki.com.  

 

Greetings!  Carie Hinkle here.  I’m a sixth grade English Language Arts instructor in the heart of the Ozark Mountains in the U.S. I first came across Voki a few years ago while attending a technology conference.  However, it was a student led event in my own classroom that brought the full value Voki has to offer to my attention.  Student leaders were charged with the task of creating a lesson integrating technology with a relevant classroom application.  One of our student leader teams selected Voki as their technology tool. Throughout the day I received a flood of Vokis created by my students sharing everything from what their plans were for the weekend to their favorite event from the day, but my student leaders struck gold when they gave each class their summative assessment.  Their assignment? Create a Voki about a book you recently finished and email it to Mrs. Hinkle before you leave.  The idea of Voki Book Talks was born!

 

Taking from their idea, I began to look at the current format students were using to share about their reading  and how I could implement these expectations into this amazing resource.  Next, I set up a list of expectations each Voki would need to share during the book talk and within a few days my students were creating highly engaging and informative book talks.

Book Talk Expectations

Here is the list I established for Voki Book Talks:

1. Create a Voki for each book you would like to share with others.
2. It must include your Name. (First Name Only)  Ex. “Hi, George here.”
3. Title of Book and Author of Book
4. Three specific details about the book.
5. Your favorite part of the book.
6. Would you recommend this book? If yes why? If no, why not?
7. Your Voki must be written in complete sentences, using correct conventions, and it must make sense.
8. Email your Voki to your teacher and any friends you want to share it with who have school email accounts.

What Happened Next?

 

Well, students joined together to dance and sing joyful songs about my awesomeness as a teacher, of course!  Okay, that might be a bit of hyperbole on my part, but the improvement in my students’ abilities to present their knowledge was very real and just shy of a miracle cure for some of my emergent readers and writers.

I saw an immediate improvement in the quality of summaries my students submitted.  I attribute this to many things that make Voki.com unique and special.  If the student didn’t use correct conventions when writing the book talk, their Voki paused or didn’t pause appropriately while speaking. They could hear the errors even better than when they read their writing out loud to themselves.  Also, if their writing didn’t make sense, neither did their Voki.  It was so exciting to see students as they self assessed and made quality revisions in their work voluntarily and without prompts from me.

Now we share our Voki Book Talks in class with everyone.  Gone are the isolated teacher student conversations from which no one benefits.  Instead, students are excited to share via email with their friends and vie for the opportunity to share in class.  In addition, students can go to a shared book talk document and view Voki book talks from all of my classes.  Another new goal among my students is to have s featured Voki book talk on my website.  Knowing I change out the featured Vokis every week has created a frenzy to finish their books in time to submit a Voki before I select my next featured artists.

Emergent writers are more comfortable working in this medium because they can write, listen, and revise their work privately.  This is allows them to gain confidence in their skills and to experience successful sharing among their peers.  I’ve also noticed students are more willing to take risks using richer word choices and more complex sentences.

Thanks, Voki.com!  You have created a way that allows students to use technology in a way that changes learning.

Check out some Voki Book Talks! Wouldn’t your students love this?

The Dead and Buried 

By Kim Harrington

Student: Ashley

http://www.voki.com/php/viewmessage/?chsm=599280fddbd3fd2cce5ff884c7442903&mId=2520097

Virals

By Kathy Reichs

Student: Jazzy

http://www.voki.com/php/viewmessage/?chsm=af7009c76d960426bd446fa4c5574f84&mId=2520321

Miracle On 30th Street

By Mike Lupica

Student: Layton

http://www.voki.com/php/viewmessage/?chsm=852d6cf477fcb5a43f0368ad94e603a8&mId=2535263

​The Goddess Test

By Aimee Carter

Student: Daniela

http://www.voki.com/php/viewmessage/?chsm=94239f66b1b2e23b1e0a93480754cbe4&mId=2520596

 Watch her amazing Book Talks Video here

Thanks, Carie!  Hopefully we’ll be seeing a lot more Voki Book Talks in classrooms everywhere!

Carie is a 6th grade ELA teacher at Hollister Middle School in the heart of the Ozark Mountains in Missouri. She has taught 4th and 5th grade in years past, but has finally met her true passion in 6th grade ELA. She has a Masters in Elementary Education and is currently working toward her eMINTS certification and becoming an authorized Google Trainer. She is excited to join forces with Voki.comand to encourage others to use technology in a way that changes learning.