Useful digital tools for material designing: Wordclouds and Voki

           We would like to share with you our personal experience when working at the Institute with these digital tools a few weeks ago, one of our teachers at Brown presented the idea of working with these resources so as to integrate them in our lessons.
          First of all we want to make clear what wordclouds are. By means of wordclouds generators such as wordclouds or tagul we can create ‘an image composed of words used in a particular text or subject, in which the size of each word indicates its frequency or importance.’ (Oxford Dictionary, 2016). Here is an example:

           These could be thought as not so relevant technologies to manage when thinking of material designing but it is important for us, future teachers of English, because our field of study sees languaage as a whole, being the written word an integral part of it. We can use them with different texts, we can also provide them as material during our lessons so the students can work on the words present in the clouds or we can even encourage them to produce their own and share them with the rest of the class. The possibilities are endless and the use each of us make of them depends on our personal choice since they offer many opportunities by being such a flexible tool.

           For instance, the ones you can see above are the ones we produced to share some related concepts with the rest of our classmates in a subject where we work on material designing and ICTs integration for this purpose. They are simple and easy to read but there are many other shapes, fonts, colours and sizes to choose so that wordclouds can adapt to any topic and to all kinds of needs, you just need to include words in isolation or you can paste a selected text.

           As regards Voki, the other tool we have used in this lesson, we can say that it is another tool we can use to integrate ICTs in the classroom. They mix written and spoken language since

you can also paste a previously selected text  and then, a cartoon character would ‘recite’ it aloud. It is an interesting tool since it is innovative and it definitively calls students’ attention but we, as future teachers of English, dislike the fact that the characters sound like robots and pronunciation is hindered, affecting the perception of connected speech, That is why we should consider using the microphone function where teachers or students can record themselves.
           All in all, we can conclude that the experience of using these tools has been enriching because we could be acquainted with different kinds of devises for designing material which we were not used to work with, being these two different ways of integrating ICTs into the classroom.
Sources:
http://www.voki.com/
http://www.wordclouds.com/