Voki for Education is a neat talking avatar creation service that has gained quite a bit of popularity with elementary and middle school teachers. Using nothing more than their keyboard and mouse students can create customized talking avatars. Add in a microphone and students can use their own voices for their avatars. Finished avatars can be embedded into a blog, wiki, or website or simply shared on the Voki site.

Applications for Education
Voki for Education now offers a lesson plan database that anyone can access. If you have lesson plans of your own that you would like to share, you can add them to the database. Here are a couple of the ideas I quickly gleaned from the database. Voki has been used by educators to have students create and produce short digital stories. Some teachers have students create Voki avatars to practice their foreign language pronunciations without the fear of having their classmates judging them on the spot.