The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Voki Part 1

I thought about calling this series, "The Foes and Woes of Voki," but it didn't quite fit, because there are some very good things about this app. But I have a friend who wrote a play called, "The Foes and Woes of Dracula." And I don't know why, but when I was thinking about this series, I thought of that play. Or maybe Voki reminds me of Dracula; you're pulling for it to win, but you wish it could be a little more cool. Or maybe a neuron misfired and gave me the connection for that title.

In any event...



The Good


When I first saw voki back in 2007, I thought it was the savior of boring student podcasts and class webpages. My class was writing poetry at the time, and so they made their vokis, recorded their written poetry and created something that turned their written work into something that they were eager to share and listen to over and over again.
That's the magic of this application.


When I moved to Sudan my 5th graders still recorded poetry, and we also started making weekly podcasts about the stuff we did in class. I then posted them to our class website. This was a big draw for the children. They'd go to the class website during their free time, listen to each other, and post comments about what they heard. The class website became an interesting place to visit, which I believe is a central goal for any class website.

After I moved to Nepal, I started using voki as teasers for our personal narratives to be posted on our e-portfolios. Since the free voki services allow for a maximum of 60 seconds, I felt that teasers fit this limitation nicely:

It's at this stage when I ran into some problems that made Voki unusable. But I won't go into that here. In my next post, I'll talk about the bad and the ugly of Voki.