Welcome To Voices Of The World, a place to connect educators around the world.
This network was created by Sharon Tonner, now a University Lecturer, to connect children together using their voices rather than the written or typed word. It was also created to enable children to develop an appreciation of different languages, accents and dialects from around the world.

For the next few months the project will be led by student teachers at the University of Dundee. 

The aim is to release a task at the beginning of the month with all contributions completed by the end of the month. Contributions are in the form of embedded code which are sent to Jennifer who then places them on the VOTW wikispace.

The VOTW wikispace for that month is not released until the last day of the month so that all members can look and view all contributions from around the world.

If you would like to join, you need to have primary school children to work with who are not in a participating school.

The aim of VOTW is to hopefully allow children to appreciate the voices of other children from all around the world.

Just a gentle reminder that this network is for the teachers involved in VOTW and not for the children.



I am currently working on the children's area with all our completed vokis. The plan is to diplay all the vokis in one area - wikispace. I am then going to take all the audio from each voki and create a podcast so that it is like a show. I can do this for everyone this month as each file is very small but in later tasks there may be an element of only selecting specific voices for the podcast but still displaying the main task.



Just a wee bit background on the project, i initally created VOTW as an E-twinning project to unite voices around the world. to make it the world I need to branch out of Europe hence why all you lovely teachers are involved.



Because the site is popular I have to adapt to the interest and realise that some of my inital ideas might not be feasible anymore due to the size as it would not be interesting to the children to listen to a podcast that lasts over an hour. When using different voices and languages children need to be kept focussed and entertained.



To do this I will incorporate a different piece of software each month that you can use from the internet so that not only are the children participating in a global project using their voice they are also learning new ICT skills and hopefully some teachers too.



Briefly, the next themes are National Anthem, Nursery Rhyme, Jingle Bells, Hopes For The Future etc. All these will be in the child's language but this should not present a barrier to understanding as the children have already completed the task and know understand the concept.



The power of the voice and sound are amazing tools if used in a structured environment.



I hope this answers some questions and puts the project into a perspective. Sharon