Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Adventures with Avatars

"Who dares to teach must never cease to learn." (John Cotton Dana).

Has anyone tried or used avatars to motivate writing?

Have tried using Voki's to create a character who has lots of adventures, although without prompting, there wasn't a great deal of motivation. Had better success with using a Voki to recite a poem, the idea of creating a virtual character to read out their own poems motivated even the most reluctant writers to have a go. The children seem to like creating their virtual character and to just say a message rather than using it as a stimulus for writing. Although, to even write a mesage 'that can be talked back' they have to use correct spelling and practice typing.

1 comment:

  1. I found the same with voki. THe kids loved the fact that their character talked what they wanted. I thought it was a great thing to use at publishing stage of writing. Its a shame the software isn't quite good enough to really read the punctuation accurately - its still rather robotic, and needs an NZ accent. Good to promote accurate sentences, grammar and spelling though.

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