SPUD YOURSELF

What is the link?
http://www.walkers.co.uk/funstuff/spudyourself.html

Spud Yourself is a great text-to-speech website by allowing users to turn themselves into talking potatoes. Simply upload a photograph with your whole face facing the camera, type whatever text you want your potato-self to say, choose a speaking voice, and see yourself as a talking spud. This website also has directions on how to spud one’s self. Overall, Spud Yourself is a simple concept, that don’t require complex set-up or elaborate customization options.

How to integrate "Spud Yourself" into the classroom?

The simplicity of Spud Yourself is what makes this site fun for beginner language learners. It’s self-explanatory and straightforward. Teachers can have their students describe themselves and use it as a text for their talking potatoes. To create a more fun environment, a teacher can allow his/her students to use his/her photo and have the students come up with dialogues that the teacher might say in class. Spud Yourself can also be use as an introduction for students.

Advantages:

One of the advantages of Spud Yourself is that it creates a relaxed learning environment for students. It is a fun and entertaining way for language learners to create basic sentences. Also, because it is simple to use, learners can independently use this site to put together words and descriptions.

Disadvantages:

As one of my colleagues mentioned, this site is a marketing tool for Walker Chips’ to advertise itself. Therefore, the more often it is used, the more revenue Walker Chips’ will gain from this site. With the exception of the text, everything is done for the user; thus, not allowing learners to develop their communication skills. Furthermore, this website is quite limiting when it comes to improving other language learning skills. In summary, I believe this website to be quite entertaining at first, but it also quickly loses its novelty.