I recently came across a new tool which can be a very good help in class, for listening exercises.

One of the common problems we sometimes have is that we easily find a listening exercise on the topic we need, but the language level is not adequate to our students. Creating a Voki (a speaking avatar) can help solve that problem, because we may create the text ourselves and then have it spoken by another voice, with the voice (male / female) and accent we  choose.

It just takes registering in   www.voki.com   and then creating the speaking avatar is very easy (I have a few in my personal area); other languages besides English are also available there (but I haven �t tried them, so I don �t know how they sound).
Just click on the link below (or copy-paste it to another window, I don�t really know how it goes) to be redirected to Sylvia Voki, the avatar I created (with an Indian accent) to show you how they go (I gave her an Indian accent, but others are also available there):


http://www.voki.com/pickup.php?scid=11302756&height=267&width=200


The only problem about Vokis is that they only work online - as far as I know, one cannot download them to a flashdrive to use them whenever there is no available Internet connection.