STEAM Wattsburg Area Middle School
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What are AVATARS? Avatars are virtual people/critters.
How can they be used in education? Avatars are a creative way for students to express themselves. For some, getting in front of a camera is daunting. This provides another avenue for sharing/learning.
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Autobiography
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Biography of ANYONE
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Digital Storytelling
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Book reports
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PSAs
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News Reports
http://digitalsandbox.weebly.com/avatars-flipped-classroom.html
The two most frequently used:
Blabberize
Upload a photo, draw on a mouth, and record.
Potential uses: character studies, book reports, biographies
Website:
http://blabberize.com/
Voki
Customize a virtual you. You must create an account to save the Voki. Vokis can be embedded into websites or the link can be shared out.
Website:
http://www.voki.com/
Noteworthy: Voki has an educational version, called Voki Classroom. Not free, but worth exploring.
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Web Tools for Kids
Or use these generators to create representations of your online personality or personalities.
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Be Funky (cartoonizes your pics)
Comic Generators
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ToonDoo (cartoon generator)
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Bubblr (make comics from pics posted on Flickr)
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Makebeliefscomix
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GoAnimate (adds sound and special effects to your toons!)
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Be Funky - Create Comic Strips from Photographs
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Comiqs - Create Comics to Play as Slideshows
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Pikikids - Comics Creation for Kids
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Make Beliefs, like other comic strip creation tools, provides teachers with way to get students to write in a manner that doesn't feel like a traditional writing assignment. The option to create comic strips in seven different languages makes Make Beliefs useful for foreign language teachers as well as ESL/EFL teachers.
What is Wordle?
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Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends. (http://www.wordle.net/)
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