Enhancing Students’ Speaking Skills Using Voicethread, Utellstory and Voki

According to our national curriculum one of the competences is to develop speaking/communication skills. This competence requires accurate presentation of a verbal message,  participating in dialogues on familiar topics in everyday life situations. The students must be able to identify  key information from audio or video messages. They must identify and distinguish  stylistic registers of the  audio messages and establish  relations between speakers, narrate  the content of a film/ of a story/ an article on the basis of a given plan. 

During a lesson the teacher can’t dedicate too much time to develop speaking skills and not all students have the possibility to speak and express themselves. Online tools may easily help the teacher and the student as well to enhance their speaking skills. The platforms , which I want to present, give our students the opportunity to practice speaking.

In order to  register  an excellent presentation they will register it not only once, and not twice , but may be three and more times. Only when they are happy with what they hear they will publish it. In class, for sure they don't have the possibility to say again what they have already said, and, of course, they don't hear themselves  when they speak in class. At home they listen to their speech and they may notice some mistakes, and after the teacher comments their work they can reregister it again.

I would love to present you three of these amazing tools: Voicethread, Voki and UtellStory, which may help the students to enhance their speaking skills.

Voki is an educational tool that allows users to create their very own talking character. Voki characters can be customized to look like historical figures, cartoons, animals, and even yourself! Give your Voki a voice by recording with a microphone,  or uploading an audio file. Voki characters can be emailed, shared on social media, and embedded on websites!  It is a very simple tool and even don't need to have an account to register your voice.

Here  you can follow a tutorial Youtube and learn how to create a voki.  Your voki may be used as short presentation at the beginning of the year or as an introduction to a topic. It is funny and students will love it, primary school pupils will adore using it.Here is an example of VokiSanda's Voki

UtellStory is a storytelling platform for students to use their voices to share what they're learning in class and experiencing in life. When finished, share your UtellStory slideshow using email, Facebook, or the embed link code. Here is a pretty nice tutorial how  to  sing up and  how to use  UtellStoryAnd several examples of pupils’ work

A famous personalityWhom I admire

Voicethread is a totally web-based application that allows you to place collections of media like images, videos, documents, and presentations at the center of an asynchronous conversation. A VoiceThread allows people to have conversations and to make comments using any mix of text, a microphone, a web cam, a telephone, or uploaded audio file. You may watch a tutorial here how to use voicethread and how to embed it.

You can ask a question and the students asynchronously may answer to the question one by one using Voice thread. In the same time they can listen to their classmates answers and try to be more ingenious. They can register their essay using pictures and even videos.  Eating out, 10th formLudwig van Beethoven                                                       The Queen of Great Britain          Jennifer Aniston Famous People A trip around the worldA film review  A. Sirbu- Moldovan paiter   

All  these platforms may be used to organize many other activities, like - to debate a topic- to brainstorm ideas - to role play a dialogue and others. A  strong point is that while registering their voice they read and read their essay or story very many times and in such a way they memorize a good part of it. So, even if they don’t write something by themselves they will learn for sure at least some words or expressions from that text, they will improve their reading and speaking skills.

I am just at the beginning of this path full of different possibilities and I am going to explore it more and more. I advise you to explore the online tools and use them with your students.

Good Luck!