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.

 

Challenge Based Resource

Image by topgold via Flickr

As I begin to develop my curriculum and materials for the upcoming school year I ran across a great website on challenge based learning. This site provides resources and examples that really demonstrate how to develop and implement this type of learning environment. It is an excellent resource to help teachers begin to develop their own lessons. Not only am I excited about giving this a try in the upcoming school year I believe it to be a great resource for other teachers to use.

Check it out at http://ali.apple.com/cbl/

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Help Students Find Their “True Swing”!

Wow! Time flys! With the school year coming to a close and state testing taking place I have been a bit overwhelmed. So I apologize for being off task and not posting as regular to this blog.

Over this past week as I have had time, I was reading my regular blogs and came across a post that, of course, I cannot find now which mentioned the movie, “The Legend of Bagger Vance“.  It got me to thinking about this movie and its many different messages. One that I feel is so important for students and teachers is to help students find their “True Swing”.  Their true passion in life.  Every student has a gift in a particular area, and it is so important for educators to help students find that area they are gifted in and have a passion for.  This is the key to success for many students.  Unfortunately, many time students do not find it until later in life and miss out on much of their education.  Watch the video clip below, and as I said to my colleagues at our school lets make this one of our new goals to help students find their “True Swing”!

20 Student Favorite Cartoon Creators

As I watched Tom Wujec’s TED talk today I was struck by the simplicity of his message. All teachers know that a good visual is key to success in the classroom. But what really intrigued me was the concept of students creating visuals to cement their learning. Over the past two years I have noticed that students who create visual projects in my class often retain information better than those who wrote papers.

In my project based classroom one of the most popular mediums for students projects has become cartoon creators. Not only do students enjoy creating these projects but the the process of taking their knowledge and depicting it visually on paper seems to be very effective in their learning process. I have often talked to students about one of their projects that they created at the beginning of the year and not only can they tell me about the project but they still remember the underlying concept taught at that time. This has always intrigued me and led me to create a long list of cartoon creators for students to use.

For those of you interested in giving this a try here are 20 of the most popular cartoon creators my students like to use.

1. GoAnimate.com
2. Toonlet.com
3. Toondoo.com
4. Pixton.com
5. Chogger
6. Comic Creator
7. Comic Lab
8. Make Believe Comix
9. Strip Creator
10. Strip Generator
11. Zimmer Twins
12. Do Ink
13. Comic Strip Generator
14. Comic Master
15. Captain Underpants
16. Comicbrush
17. Marvel Comic Creator
18. Witty Comic Creator
19. Cartoon to Customize
20. Bitstrips

Poll for Student Response, Here Is a Great Tool!

Getting feed back from students is critical.  I am always looking for ways to elicit feedback from students on content and learning styles.  Often times the feedback needed by teachers is not comprehensive but simple in nature.  I have often used online survey makers and quizzes, but these can be difficult to make and often hard to link to your class or school websites.  However, today I cam across a website called Pollmo Polls.

Pollmo Polls is an easy to use poll creator that is easy to embed in your school or class website.  It is so quick and easy to use it can be created and posted ion less than 3-4 minutes.  I highly recommend this site to quick poll and  assess your students online. This is one that I definitely plan to use in the upcoming new year.  Check it out at the following address: http://pollmo.com/

I found out about this site through Mr. Byrne’s website “Free Technology For Teachers” if you have not read this blog I highly recommend it. To read it go to this address: http://www.freetech4teachers.com/.

View Qualtrics Poll
Qualtrics Survey Software
Enterprise Feedback Management

Need a Simple Visual try “SimpleDiagrams”

Need to express a relationship between concepts or give a quick visual to make your point? SimpleDiagrams might just be the tool that you have been looking for.  This is a free desktop tool that allows you to quickly create a visual that you can use to express your ideas to your students.  It has some very simple features such as the ability to drag and drop, export to png, and add images.  These quick learning images can then be stored on your computer or posted to the web.  This is a simple and small utility program that is free and worth a look.  Check it out at http://www.simplediagrams.com/.

Don’t just teach them, teach them how they learn

Image via Wikipedia

This week as I was teaching my class different reading strategies they could apply to their textbooks.  I  brought up how everyone has a different learning style.  To my surprise many of them did not understand what I was talking about.  This concerned me.  I realized that not only do I need to teach these kids my subject specific content but I also need to help them understand how they learn.  It is very important that students gain an understanding of how they learn.  This provides them insight on how they should study and approach their learning.  With out this knowledge they are at a real disadvantage in their education.  So like a good teacher, I scraped my next days lesson and began looking at how I could help my students understand how they learn.

So the next day we discussed what the different styles of learning were and I had the students take an assessment that helped them find out what learning style best fits them.  In this process I found 10 great sites that contain great learning style assessments.  So if you find your self in a similar position as me in your class use these sites to help your students learn how they learn.

1. Multiple Intelligences (Find your Strengths)
2. What is your learning style?
3. The VARK Questionnaire
4. Free learning styles inventory, including graphical results
5. Index of Learning Styles Questionnaire
6. What are my Learning Strengths?
7. Learning Styles Explained
8. Multiple Intelligences
9. Multiple Intelligences Inventory
10. Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligence theories model

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School Resources Part Four: Online Presentation Programs

Image via Wikipedia

Over the past couple of years students have found a variety of ways to present information to the class.  Many of their presentations were very creative and unique below is a list of some of the programs that they have used in the past and I will be link on my website for the kids this year.  Again if you know of any others or have anything to add about the sites link please drop me a line.

Presentation Programs

1. AuthorStream

2. Empressr

3. Eyespot

4. PhotoStory 3

5. Prezi

6. SlideShare

7. ThinkFree Show

8. Thumbstacks

9. Toufee

10.Zoho Show 11.280 Slides

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Interested In Augmenting Your Classrooms Reality?

AR Game

Over the past year I have begun exploring different Augmented Reality learning environments for my students.  I had the good fortune of receiving 30 GPS enabled cell phones for my class that I could experiment  with the last three months of last year.  In that time I was able to piece together some Augmented Reality games for kids to play on our football field.  The results were astounding, the level of engagement and the conversations among students were highly educational and inspired me to look into this type of learning environment more. As I surfed the web I came across games such as:

• Sky Siege
• Pandemica: AR Shooter
• Zombie ShootAR

I began to wonder why could we not use this type of technology in our classrooms.  Getting the students into the real world and interact with virtual items or people to solve real world problems.  While the games I employed were simple and crude do to the time frame that I was under last year I did find that the learning and engagement of the concepts I was trying to teach increased in all students.  Also the post game discussions about the topic were much more productive since all of the students had a stake in the conversation due to the experience they just had playing the game. So this summer I have been looking at creating different types of Augmented Reality learning environments to use in my classes next year.  If you are looking to create these same types of learning environments or know someone who is please contact me.  I would like to know what you are looking at creating.

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Want Gauge Your Students Quickly? Try Urtak

Often times we as teachers are want to receive input from students to assess their learning.  There are many different ways to accomplish this task, tests, quizzes, projects and presentations to name just a few.  However, sometimes I just want to know the opinion of my students on a particular topic or just to a quick comprehension check and do not want to have to create a test or quiz to gauge the classes progress.  There are many quiz makers and assessment tools that can be found on the web but one that I found to be simple to use in many different applications was “Urtak“.  This site allows you to create quickly and easily simple yes or no questions.  It then provides you some simple code that you can cut and paste on any website.  I have found that these can be very helpful in assessing student progress and engagement.  It can also provide teachers with some simple data to make future decisions for their classes.  Since the quizzes are only yes or no questions students are not as intimidated to answer them.  These types of questions allows for a good assessment of how the students felt about a topic or lesson at that particular moment.  You can find this resource at  http://urtak.com

Click the link below to see an example poll.

Would you use this?

Here are a couple of other links to great polling and survey websites and services.

1. PollDaddy http://polldaddy.com/
2. Survey Monkey http://www.surveymonkey.com/
3. Zoomerang http://www.zoomerang.com/
4. Survey Gizmo http://www.surveygizmo.com/
5. Survey Pro http://www.esurveyspro.com/
6. Mr. Poll http://www.misterpoll.com/
7. Poll Code  http://pollcode.com/

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