Doppel Me – Making Avatars easy!

In my new role as Head of ICT and learning innovation I am lucky enough to get around the different year levels and support students and teachers in the integration of ICT into lessons.

I have worked this week with the students in Year 5-7 and have been looking at Cybersafety – using the excellent Australian Government resource Cybersmart and the Cyber Quoll videos related to this. In addition to this I am putting together a programme for the introduction of Cybersafety in all year levels with a suitable scope and sequence.

During the Cybersafety lessons one of my students brought up a great question relating to images of people online, which lead to a short discussion (to be continued later though in further lessons) about our digital footprint. After the lesson finished the student came up to me and said “Mr K, why don’t we just create fake pictures of ourselves for our profiles, wouldn’t that be easier”. Good call young man – I thought to myself. Avatars!!!!

I have used Avatars a lot before and have worked with students on them but I have always struggled with finding one that is simple and effective, until now (Thanks to Abena – @iTeachTweets).

Doppelme is a free and easy online application to create a funky avatar. Not only did it take me 20 minutes in a technology lesson today to get ALL of my students to complete their avatar but they also utilised our prior learning by collecting the embed code and embedding them onto their Wikispace pages (which we are using tentatively as an e-portfolio as a trial).

http://www.doppelme.com/ – a great (and FREE) and easy to use avatar creator for any year level. I highly recommend giving this a go.

I would love to hear your thoughts on Doppel Me and other avatar programmes you use as well

Enjoy, explore and have fun!