voki

i have to admit, i am not sold on avatars. this may go back to my middle school self's loathing of the times when i would go over to friend's house and they would want to spend hours playing sims... who knows. but i ended up on the world languages group of edutopia and saw a reference to voki. having never heard of it, i checked it out and discovered that it's a program that lets you create "personalized speaking avatars" for free that you then have the option of using on blogs and in emails. this actually seems like a potentially cool resource for foreign language classrooms, and i'll keep it in mind for this summer.