My avatar

Hello there! Thanks for reading my blog again. In this post I'm going to deal with the different ways of using avatars in the classroom. Hope you like it and if you have any recommendations about the activities that I propose let me know.

First of all I want to tell you how amazed I am to see the amount of different websites where you can create an avatar. It's great that you can create from an avatar cat to a nearly human avatar. And I also think that's one of the reasons why they can be used in so many ways.

I've chosen two websites, in order to create examples of activities where I can use the avatars in the classroom.

• Monsters INC
  I present you Euge Van der Slime:
  
  
  
  This Avatar was really easy to create and I think it could work really well as part of a revision activity for parts of the body, or clothing accessories.  I can definitely see myself using this avatar for an activity with my 3rd form students. The website interface is really easy, and I can demonstrate once on the projector, and then in pairs they could create the monsters, and the descriptions. 

• Voki
  I present you Nymphadora Tonks.
  
  I created this avatar, thinking that it could be used for an activity with young adults, while reading a part of any of the Harry Potter books. The idea would be for each student to select a character and create a talking avatar. I think this kind of avatar allows you to work with pronunciation, which is great!
  
  Of course there are many other ways to introduce avatars into our classroom. This is just my humble contribution.
  Hope you liked it!
  Read you soon :)
  
  
  Euge 

Blogby steps..

What have I done to make this blog look readable?

Well, It took me a long time and patience, since I'm new in the blogspot world. But basically here is a list of the settings that I have modified in order to customize the blog environment.

The name

This part of the process was the most difficult one since I could not say no to the idea that although the blog is an assignment it should have a catchy name somehow. I started thinking about what we had talked during the class, and decided that It had to include somehow the term Geek or Geeky.

I looked up the definition of geek and I found that one of the entries in  http://www.urbandictionary.com/ said that a Geek is "Someone who has an obsession with computers and/or whose life consists of computer related tasks". I don't think every teacher needs to be a geek in order to include technology in the classroom, but you can always try and be slightly geeky, thinking about and using technology in the class.

The Blog template

I choose one of the basic watermark templates, and changed the colour scheme a little. The template is nice enough and it doesn't distract the reader. 

Advanced settings

Another important step was the configuration of the different fonts. For the title I selected a more striking font, called "chewy", and for the rest of the blog I picked the one called "Coming soon".

Gadgets

The broad range of gadgets available makes it really difficult to decide on which ones to select for your blog. I selected the Search box, the one that gives you the option to subscribe to the blog, and the one that lets you put a picture, as a decoration.


Hope you liked my post.
Comments are well received!
Thanks for reading!!