Now THAT'S a 21st Century Learning Project!!!

Classrooms with out walls! International cultural exchange! World language awareness!.. all wrapped up in a FUN, stimulating body of authentic activities. The Project: "Voices of the World" is all that and more! ( http://votw.wikispaces.com/September's+Task )

The project makes use of Voki, a free online resource that gives users animated avatars that are enabled with text to speech technology (or you can phone in or upload a pre-recorded digital audio for your avatar). The finished Voki presentation can be emailed (kind of like an eCard) or embedded in a blog, etc. VERY COOL! Best of all this resource is easy to use!!!!! ( http://www.voki.com/ )

The plot thickens when you realize that voki will translate from many languages to many languages - and the head begins to spin when you think of the possibilities of authoring a message in one language, translating it to another, using a resource like Alta Vista's Babel Fish, and pasting the translated text into Voki's text to speech function!

One final thought, and this one will be explored in much greater detail in the future. Now that the media has been democratized, and that any and all world citizens can publish their own content, we will soon need to concentrate more on the quality of that content as the novelty of being (Web 2.0) published wears thin. More than just good content (accurate, well expressed, relevant, and valid) it will have to be audience worthy as it vies (sp?) for attention among the dizzyingly countless self-published content items floating around out there attempting to seduce an audience. And of course, what a great problem that is to have!