Implementing Voki in ELA- A Lesson in Leadership

How can educators encourage student engagement, a deeper understanding of the text and characters, while creating activities that are fun? Voki. Voki is an educational tool where students can customize facial features, clothing and voice to resemble a character, or whomever they desire.

Implementing this technological tool may seem daunting at first, but through allowing students to engage with material in a new and exciting way, student comprehension skyrockets.

A Long Walk to Water is filled with rich characters that are developed throughout the novel. How can students utilize the technological tool of Voki to develop a particular character?

In this multi-sequence lesson students will utilize the text of A Long Walk to Water to facilitate their understanding of how individuals cope and take action during crisis.

First, students will re-read page 15, when Salva realizes that he has been left by his group due to his adolescence. After allowing students time to reflect in their journals about what type of emotions this passage invoked, the class will begin a large group discussion.

During this discussion focus the questions around: Do you agree or disagree with the group? How do you think Salva reacted? Would you have reacted differently? How is the sense of community/family different in crisis? Attempt to draw attention between the ways that different communities care for children during moments of crisis — are they nurtured and cared for or are they left behind? Why?

After a class discussion students will be prompted to work collaboratively in pairs to create a Voki. This Voki must be in a moment of crisis. The character can be a leader (like the ones who left Salva), it can be a child, or it can be a group member that is struggling to make a decision. After creating their Voki's students will present them to the class and briefly explain why they chose to portray their Voki in this manner, and if they think their Voki would have helped or hindered Salva during his moment of crisis.

Following presentations, students will reflect in their journals about what kind of characteristics they want to personally exhibit during crisis. This lesson challenges students to draw connections between an textual character, themselves, and an arbitrary character that they create. The integration of technology in this lesson allows students to create a product that unifies all these various connections into one identity. This lesson connects to the Grand Challenge of advancing personalized learning, as students are able to create Voki’s that make sense to them, and demonstrate their own particular sense of knowledge.

(CCRA.W.3) Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, descriptive details, and clear event sequences: use narrative techniques, such as dialogue, description, and pacing, to develop experiences and events or show the responses of characters to situations

This standard is met through students creating a Voki where they will draw upon real and imagined events, to create a story that has a clear sequence of thought process during crisis. Students will utilize dialogue, a description of the scene, and pacing to develop the character and the crisis.