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.