Monthly Archives: October 2012

Time to Make Student Avatars

Posted on by
Reply
Are your students using Edublogs, Kidblog, Edmodo, VoiceThread? Consider planning an important technology lesson soon: student avatars.   An avatar is a digital representation of a person, in this case, your students.  Kids LOVE making avatars, and it’s good practice to use avatars rather than student pictures for profiles on educational sites.

Building Community: 
An important aspect of differentiated instruction and Responsive Classroom is developing community. Avatars are a wonderful tool to help your students learn more about each other.  Avatar makers like Build Your Wild Self can be used to have students share information about themselves.  Try this:  Have students create an avatar that represents themselves and upload it onto their blog (blog avatar-Kidblogs and Edublogs).  At morning meeting, share student avatars and practice asking good questions or making good comments. A variation would be to post groups of avatars on your blog without any labels, project your post on your interactive white board and have students practice asking questions of classmates to find out which avatar they created.  

 

Avatar Resources:  Students will need to use the Snipping tool  to save their avatar creations (available on all Windows 7 machines: Start>Snipping Tool).  Avatars should be saved as .jpg images. Not using Windows 7?  Miss W. explains how to save your avatars on her blog post.

 

Build Your Wild Self . . . . This avatar lets you create a human, animal, or combination (animal/human) avatar. You can choose all the features of your avatar body, mouth, eyes, background etc. When you’re use the “Snipping Tool” to save.

Lego Avatar . . . Like the Build Your Wild Self avatar, you can choose the face, hair, background and much more for your avatar.  When you visit the site click on the icons below the Lego figure.  You can make all the changes you want.  Use the “snipping tool” to save your avatar.

 

Kerpoof . . . This site doesn’t have an avatar maker, but it has a picture maker that is works well for this purpose.  Students can add backgrounds and characters.  These creations are easily saved as jpg images.  Students do not need to login to create and save a picture.

 

Would you like support with avatars? Snipping Tool? Request integration support! 

I will model, co-teach or help you plan avatar lessons for your students.

Creating eBooks on the iPad

Posted on by
Reply

Second grade classes at Porter’s Point School are creating interactive books on iPads with illustrations, text and student narration.

They began by creating original art using Doodle Buddy.  Doodle Buddy is a fun and functional art app kids can use to create digital art.  Preloaded backgrounds, stamps, stencils and a variety of drawing tools support students of all artistic abilities.

Once their images are saved to the camera roll, they are used in Book Creator to create an eBook.  Importing images and adding text & narration is a snap!  This is a simple, yet powerful eBook creator.

This video tutorial shows you book creator in action:

To publish books, there are a few choices.  Books could be emailed in PDF or e Pub format.  e Pub files can be read on a variety of mobile devices (not Kindle).  PDF files can be uploaded into a site called Issuu.  This site allows you to upload pdf files and turn them into digital magazines, books or newspapers.  These digital creations (less audio content) can then be embedded into teacher or student blogs as a turn-page digital book.  PDF files can also be printed to provide a hard copy of student work.

I created the book below showcasing Mrs. Hooper’s class using Doodle Buddy to create their images. This is the ePub file.  Open this blog post on your iPad/iPhone and click the link to open in iBooks. On Android devices, you can use the Nook, Google Play and Sony Reader apps (all support ePub format) to add student books to a mobile device. Parents will love saving their child’s work on their mobile devices and sharing them with friends and family!

This is how a book looks like when it’s emailed as a pdf file and uploaded into Issuu.  The embed code provided can be used to create an interactive ebook on your site or blog.