Voki - Animated Avatar

A Voki is an animated avatar.







You can customise the avatar's look.

You can add voice by typing in some text and a computer generated voice will read it out, or record your own voice using the microphone.
You can add backgrounds.





And  you can publish to your blog or wiki.
You can also send to an email address and a phone
You will need to set up an account.


Get a Voki now!

More Superhero Avatars

Following on from my blogpost about The Hero Factory, there is another Superhero site. Marvel has their own website for creating superheroes.
Click Begin and then create your base.

Then go through all of the tabs to create your superhero.


To save the Superhero you need to set up an account or you can click Download and then take a screen capture.

Kid Friendly Avatar Maker - My Avatar Editor

When you show My Avatar Editor to children they recognise it straight away as it looks like the avatars (known as Mii) you can make on a Wii. It is very easy to use.
Type in your name and creator name.
Choose Gender,
Choose colours.
Then click on the buttons below to personalise your avatar.
Once you have finished click on the the Save button (the first button)

There are several save options.
I recommend using the Export option as that allows you save it as a Jpeg. You can also select the Pictures size and a background colour.

Tagul - Interactive Word Clouds

Tagul is an interactive Word (Tag) cloud. Each word is linked to a website so it becomes a navigation tool for the viewer. How it is different from Wordle is

1. words are interactive, it is a tag cloud
   
2. you can have several different fonts
3. you can have the words in a shape
   

It can be time consuming as you have to go through every word to delete common words or words that you don't want to appear in the cloud. It is still very new and the developer 'Alex' has stated that there are more features to come. In this example I used my blogsite 'ICT Teaching and Learning' to generate the words for the Word cloud, all the words in the cloud point to Google but this can be tweaked to point to other websites. Once you have played around with it for a while it is quite easy to mix and match colours, fonts, shapes and backgrounds.
It will be interesting to see how this application develops and how we could use it in education.

Comparing Embeddable Mindmapping software

I needed a Mindmap recently that would have hyperlinks to different sites. It also had to be readable and scrollable. Here are my efforts:

Webspiration was a little disappointing as it would not hyperlink when embedded. The links work when  you are in Webspiration. For ease of use, look, and ability to be creative I really like Webspiration but it falls down in the embedding. You can collaborate, upload Inspiration, download to Inspiration and you can publish on a webpage and access through a hyperlink, but you can't click on a hyperlink in the embedded document. See example below. All you can do is zoom in and out to view the document.


Result: Overall Features 8/10 Embed in blog/wiki 5/10

Mindmeister came up the best in embedding in a wiki/blog. It looks good, easy to navigate, simple to create map, graphics are limited, not much of a variety as Webspiration, but it did exactly what I wanted and that was to embed a diagram that hyperlinked. You can add notes and attachments and it can be collaborated on. It is also free, but you can upgrade for a price to a more sophisticated product with more features. Hover over the links and you will see thumbnails of the websites.


Result: Overall Features 8/10 Embed in blog/wiki 10/10

Wise Mapping is the third mind map I looked at. It is very similar to Mindmeister in all of the features. There is quite a range of colours, you can add notes and others can collaborate on it as well. There are limited graphics. It embeds easily enough but I didn't choose it as the one to go on my wiki as it is difficult to manipulate and view. Mindmeister was clearer and easier to view.



Result: Overall Features 7/10 Embed in blog/wiki 8/10

So my main choice was Mindmeister, the others had merits but Mindmeister was far ahead as the choice to use an embeddable hyperlinking mindmap.

Make a Wordsearch for your blog or wiki

Create your own Wordsearch in Wordsearch Maker and embed into your blog or wiki.
Click on the first letter and last letter of the word in the Wordsearch and it will highlight all of the words.

Make Your Own Word Search

Ways to use this application
Wordsearch on

• your Topic words
• spelling lists
• novel study characters
• number names in maths
• focus words
• essential word lists
• commonly used words
• computer terms
• conjunctions
• verbs
• adjectives
• nouns
• titles of books
• authors
• geometrical terms
• measurement terms
• children's names in class
• suburbs in your city
• cities in your country
• countries in your continent

R rating- None that I could find


If you have trouble embedding this in a wiki or a blog then add this small piece of code

Xtranormal Text to Movie - Publishing tool

I came across this method of presenting while viewing 21st Century Classroom. (an excellent presentation by a teacher who has dramatically changed her teaching style).
This movie had been made with Xtranormal.
You will need to sign up to an account to get started.
Choose your characters, your set, background music and voice. (Unfortunately there was no 'Kiwi voice' so I had to choose Australian female)
Then type (or copy/paste) your text into the 'Write the script' space.
Add more blocks to your movie and add more script. You can then drag camera angles, sounds into the script. You can change expressions and body poses.
Some uses for this application

• students can publish their writing
• present their research
  
• use as a practice for their speech writing
• teachers can use it post instructions for next topic
• teachers can use it to comment on student's work
  

The only down side was that there were a few dodgy characters wearing only fig leaves or underwear amongst the 80 characters to choose from. And there were a couple of actions/body poses that I would not be happy if children chose them. But that is when we should, as a class talk about what is appropriate in a classroom situation.
For the free account you have only 5 takes, so get it right early on! I discovered it is wise to create many blocks or your script voice would run into other sentences.
Otherwise this is a great way to share and present yours/or your student's work.

R rating - R13

Create a Library of recommended books

Library Thing is a great widget to add to your Blog or Wiki. I often get asked what books I have read that would be good for other people to read so I always refer people to my 'ICT Teaching & Learning' site that has the Library Thing widget down the side.
For your class wiki & blog create a library of books for students to read.
You do need to create an account to get started.

Click on Join now or Sign in. Click on Add Books. Type in the name of the book and click Search. It will search Amazon for all titles of that particular book. Click on the name of the book cover you like and it will be added to your Library. You can add a review or rate it by clicking on the Edit Book tab.
To add your Library to your blog or wiki, click on the Tools Tab, then click on Make a Standard Blog Widget. Make a choice of how you would like your book list to appear. Make a selection from the Preset, the Widget type, layouts etc. Edit the title then Copy the code from the right hand side and Paste into a HTML widget space in your blog or wiki.







Navigation space in Wikispaces


R rating R13

Create a Monet

Te Papa Museum in Wellington is showing 'Monet and the Impressionists' until 17 May 2009. At the moment (and I hope it continues) they are running a competition where you can upload your own photos and turn them into a Monet. You can email or IM them to others, embed in a blog or wiki or embed a link to the site. If you have screen capture software such as Jing or just plain Prt Scrn on Windows or Shift -Command- 4 on Mac then you can save a picture of your creation.

R rating: None

The Hero Factory - Create a Superhero avatar

Kids love to create avatars and what could be better than turning yourself into a 'Superhero'!
The Hero Factory has a range of looks and accessories to create your Superhero.


These can then be downloaded and used as avatars. You will need to crop them before they can use them for that purpose.

A name is generated once you have finished your creation. Mine is 'Whipped Nine Tails'

I could see these characters influencing writing. Students can create them and build their own individual Superhero bios. Students could then work collaboratively together to create their own Superhero world!







R rating: None

Mini-Mizer and Weemees: Create characters

When I was looking for ways to create character graphics for inserting into Inspiration, Kidspiration or Smart Ideas, I was very aware of finding something to use that was 'free'. I used WeeWorld to create character Weemees, and took screen captures of them to place into the diagram I was creating.


I came across Mini-mizer from 'Reasonably Clever' which creates Lego style characters, but there was adult content, so I put a tweet out on Twitter and received a link to the 'Kid Friendly version of Mini-Mizer'. It has a lot less graphics but you can still create great characters or Avatars.
Again you will still need to take screen captures to copy these images.



R rating: R13

Webspiration gets better and better...

Webspiration is Inspiration online. It is in beta now and free, so use it while you can. You do not need Inspiration on your computer, and you can work on documents online. When you are on a computer that does have Inspiration loaded on it then you can download the document to your computer.


I can see students using this by uploading a teacher/or their own prepared template to their own Webspiration account; working on it online at home; coming back to school and downloading it for marking or sharing. If students have their own accounts they can also collaborate on documents together online.

Documents can be embedded for viewing in blogs and wikis, click on the document window to see a blown up version.



R rating: None that I could find