15 Free Safe AVATAR Creators

Every year as my class begin to create their online blogs they always want some type of unique avatar to represent themselves. After a long talk about he dangers of an online presence and why not to use their real name, birthday and image of themselves, I point them to the following safe list of avatar creators. These sites are all free avatar creators. This list also represents the most popular avatar creators among my students. If you have another that is popular with your students and is free please drop me a line and let me know.

1. DoppelMe – Free Dynamic Avatars Create simple cartoon characters to represent ou as your avatar.
2. Create Avatar – South Park Studios Create a South Park Avatar to represent you.
3. Marvel Create Your Own Superhero | Make Avatars with Iron Man, Hulk, Spider-Man, Thor, Thing, Wolverine, and more Marvel Characters | Marvel.com Simple and easy to create superhero avatar creator.
4. Toy story toy creator Create your own Toy Story avatar.
5. M&M’S® Become an M&M’S® Character: Home Create your own personalized M&M avatar.
6. Raster Boy Avatar Creator Easy to create full body cartoon Avatar.
7. FaceYourManga.com | Shake Yourself! Another simple cartoon creator.
8. Lego Avatar Creator Easy Avatar creator that creates Lego Avatars.
9. Makewee Wii Avatar Creator just like the the Wii console.
10. Clay Yourself! | Hotels.com Create a claymation avatar.
11. HeroMachine 2.5, Superhero Generator, Create Your Own Hero – UGO.com Super Hero Avatar creator.
12. avatarizeyourself.com Create an Avatar movie Avatar. Upload your own picture and then turn yourself blue.
13. Wimp Yourself Diary of a wimpy kid avatars.
14. Portrait Illustration Maker : Free Illustration Generater! Simple to use avatar cartoon character creator. Has many different options and styles.
15. Voki Home This site allows you to create animated and speaking avatars. You can post a link to these speaking avatars on to your website. They can not however be downloaded.

 

5 Edtech Resources for Students

This year I have put together a list for my students of five sites that they might find helpful in their classes. These sites are ones that over the past few years my students have routinely used. I do not necessarily think that they are all great but there is something about them that students seem to like and have proven to be helpful in their studies.

Search Engines

InstaGrok: This is a great search engine that shows how facts and concepts are related. This is a great visual tool to teach kids about how searches are conducted on the web.

Fact Monster: This site allows students to find information quickly and keeps them on one site so that they do not get lost in a variety of links looking for information.

Images

Pics4Learning: Great website for students to use to find images for projects and other assignments. Teachers can use and feel safe that all images found on this website are appropriate for school.

Writing Tools

Wordsmyth: is and easy to use dictionary that provides definition pronunciation and alternative words for students to use.

Bibme: Is a great free citation and bibliography maker. It is simple easy to use and auto

Image via CrunchBase

fills in a lot of details for the students.

 

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5 Teacher Resource Edtech Tools

With the overwhelming amount edtechtools that can be found on the web, this is the first post in a series to highlight some that I

Classroom (Photo credit: James F Clay)

have found useful in the classroom and are FREE!!

The focus of this post are some TEACHER Tools that I have found useful to use with my students.

1. Dropbox:  This storage site has proved to be an extremely useful to store and access my files anywhere on any computer. Also the addon of DropitTo.me has been useful for my student to turn in their work. This is a must look at for all teachers!
2. Classroom Timers:
    Classroom timers have become a staple in my class and are an excellent way to keep students on task. This website provides a list of different types of timers and all are free to use. online-stopwatch.com
3. Duplichecker: This is a great plagiarism checker and will also check attached files. This is a free site and a great resource. I also have a list here of other plagiarism checkers.
4. Testmoz: As they state on their website, ” Testmoz is a test generator that sports 4 question types, automatic grading, a really simple interface and detailed reports.” Have used this many times and found it to be very useful.
5. QuizSnack: Is an easy way to create polls and surveys and post them to a variety of different websites.

Hundreds of Great Ideas and Just One Classroom!

Well it is that time of year again and I can already hear the school bell ringing. Like many teachers I am hitting the web and my classroom resource creating and organizing lessons. As I peruse the web looking for ideas and resources I can feel my stress level rise as I see hundreds of ideas and resources to use in my classroom.

The problem is the web has so many great ideas that it can be overwhelming. Just today I came across two great posts one from edudemic.com titled “50 Educational Technology Tools Every Teacher Should Know About” and Getting Smarts “50 Essential Edtech Tools By Category” each had 50 different tools or resources. This just added to my stress and frustration about what to do in my classroom. I quickly realized that I need to have a specific goal in mind so that I can focus on one or two aspects of Edtech in my classroom. So over the next two weeks I will be posting about 4 or 5 really good tested Edtech tools to use in the classroom. Each post will focus on a specific content area with Common Core in mind. My hope is to help myself get organized and maybe help someone else out in the process.

GAME ON! as the 2012-2013 school Year starts!

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