I would be embarrassed to tell everyone how much time I spent on Voki this week. I was highly entertained by all the options for this site. I liked how simple the website was. I can imagine students having a great time with creating voki characters. What student (or adult) wouldn’t be entertained by their voice coming out of the mouth of an alien? I wish I had known about it when I was teaching virtually. Having a tiger or dracula introducing a module to the kids for the eek would have been a fun addition to online learning. I also liked that you can add your own voice or have a generated voice that can be customized.
Here’s my Voki https://tinyurl.com/224kh397
The Chrome music lab was also a great site. There were so many fun things to play around with. I especially liked the oscillator characters. I made a song with the song maker. It was easy to do and I like how I could change the sound types. I think this website would be a great exploration tool for students learning about sound and instruments. There were also a few places to explore sound waves. This site would be a great tie-in for science lessons on sound. This website worked best with a touch screen computer. Using a mousepad could be challenging for younger students accessing the site.
Here’s my sound lab creation Chrome Music Lab – Song Maker
The third tool I used was the website Incompetech. It was a suggested site in the article 10 Best Places to Get Free Music for Your Podcast [2022] (Brooke, 2022). There were a fair amount of ads on this site. I had to scroll down to find the search options. Once I found the search it was easy to find royalty free music to download as mp3 files. There was also information on how to reference the music for download. Students needing to find royalty free music would find this website accessible. It also seemed like it wouldn’t lead students to any music that was not royalty free.
The podcast I listened to was Hey Black Child: The Podcast. I listened to an episode from July 2021 titled When I Grow Up: A Conversation with a Principal. This Podcast is put on by two young siblings, Avery and Jackson. The episodes are short, under 10 minutes and feature different issues affecting the Black community. In the episode I listened to, the siblings talked about underrepresentation of black people in the position of principal in American schools. They interviewed a black woman who is an elementary principal in Kentucky. The kids doing the podcast were personable and funny. I liked that the episodes are short for young learners. Even though the podcast is meant for children they talk about very relevant topics. There were meaningful statistics used in the episode and I did learn from listening. I think that a podcast for children aimed at filling in some of the gaps about black history is meaningful and needed.
References
Ausumer, A. & Ausumer, J. (Hosts). (2021, July 14). When I Grow Up: A conversation with a principal [Audio podcast episode]. Hey Black Child: The Podcast. https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/hey-black-child/when-i-grow-up-a-umwZM-8bYhG/#episode
Brooke, A. (2022, April 15). 10 Best Places to Get Free Music for your Podcast. Buzzsprout. https://www.buzzsprout.com/blog/free-music-for-podcasts
I also think Voki would have been great for virtual teaching! And, like you, I spent way too much time playing around with it.
I’m glad I’m not the only one!
I love the manatee! Nice work with Chrome Music Lab!
Thank you Marta. It was another fun week.
It was more fun than I thought! All the tools were brand new for me. So it was very interesting!
Thank you for displaying the chrome music lab! It overwhelmed me so I didn’t play too much with it. I also didn’t realize that you could add your own voice in voki, I just played around with the options that were available. Great job!
I was thinking that I wish I had Voki last year too! I tried to make things interesting with my Bitmoji, but she doesn’t hold a candle to hearing directions from a Jack-o-lantern! I spent a lot of time playing with it this week, so I think I’m comfortable enough to dive in next year with my kiddos. Your manatee is adorable! The Podcast that you found sounds great. I’m going to go back and look for it. It seems like it would work well in a classroom.
I also played a lot with Voki! I think the idea would be very cute to use especially if there’s some kind of class mascot! Also I love the podcast that you chose and I think it definitely stands out with the young host and their perspective. It sounds really insightful and as a black kid who rarely had black principals or even teachers, I like to hear other people’s views on it.