Speaking Practice, Less Fear

I found this sweet site called voki.com, which allows you to create an avatar and record a voice for it. You can record your voice using a microphone, type in the text that you would like to have spoken, or even record a voice by phone! I'm really excited to use this in my classes, and get my students to do some speaking!! I think this takes away some of the fear students face when speaking a foreign language because there is a little more anonymity in speaking through a character. Plus...it's fun!

Only problems I've found so far:
1) There's a 60 second limit on recordings, unless you upgrade to the paid version. But it's next to impossible to get my students speaking for anywhere close to a minute right now, so this is not such a big obstacle for the time being.
2)Sign-up seems to be a little touch and go. I signed up a few days ago, but never received a confirmation email to activate my account, so that I could save and publish my avatar. However, I tried again today with a different email address, and it worked just fine. Confirmation email arrived in seconds.

I had so much fun creating my avatar and playing around with the voice recording, that the technical issue is worth working past. This would be an excellent addition to my classes' webpage!