Voki is an audio tool with which educators can create educational videos by making their own character and personalizing the look and story of the video. I really enjoyed the variety of character options, with lots of historical, mythical, and practical options for educational purposes which makes it very useful for even specific educational videos. For example, you could have Medusa tell her own greek mythology story. After you picked your avatar for the video you could personalize the avatar through various options, depending on the avatar you chose. For instance on my sock puppet option I could not add hair but I could add a patch. I was also able to change the colors of each part (the sock, the eyes, the arm, etc.). You could change the background to a variety of animated or photo options. There were many voice options, including different accents, male and female voices, and languages; as well as the option to record your own voice. I, personally, am not a fan of using my voice so I played a lot with the Voki voices and found that some of them to be more ‘robotic’ than others. I did record my voice just to see how clearly it recorded and it was a very clear recording with no noticeable lag.
Voki video: http://tinyurl.com/yaesfx8l
Vocaroo is a very simple site with a single button and no instructions when you open it. The button is a microphone and once you press it to record you are given a pause and a stop button. You can record, pause, and continue recording as many times as you’d like until you are done and then stop the recording to listen to the final product. You then have options to ‘remove background noise’ or ‘auto adjust volume’. You can then hit save and share, which gives you a link to share your recording. This could be helpful for teachers/educators to record a quick message for an email or message or it could be used to make audio clips for computer lessons or instructions for computer work. The finalized recording also has buttons that take you directly to your facebook, reddit, twitter, whatsapp, or email with your recording for sending, posting, etc.
Vocaroo recording: https://voca.ro/ltvwaDfYhcV
Speakpipe is similar to Vocaroo, in that it is a very simple site which takes you directly to a recording button and you can make a voice recording. It is, however, in my opinion not as good. It doesn’t seem to have options to pause during your recording, has fewer sharing options, including save to your computer, Speakpipe’s server, and three buttons to share to facebook, twitter, or google+. The google+ button does not work as google+ is no longer an option. While the quality seems equal to Vocaroo as far as recording quality goes, I personally see no reason to use this over Vocaroo.
Speakpipe recording: https://www.speakpipe.com/voice-recorder/msg/8ictc37h58o06h20
I found playing with the audio tools to be fun and creative, especially Voki. I can definitely see the appeal Voki would have for all students, especially elementary and middle school students, for making video projects for class. I think this is a very useful tool for making lessons interactive and creative. I think middle and high schoolers could use the voice recording sites for presentations and projects, especially for distance learning. These tools would be great for distance power point and other speaking presentations. I can also see how these would be helpful to educators to send audio presentations or to add audio to visual presentations, particularly with current distance learning.
References:
Oddcast, Inc. (2020). Voki. http://www.voki.com/.
Vocaroo. (2007-2020). Vocaroo. http://vocaroo.com/.
Speakpipe. (2020). Speakpipe. https://www.speakpipe.com/voice-recorder.
