Much of this post has been cross posted from my class blog, ‘Kids in the Mid‘.

What an unusual title? I wonder what we are going to be doing this week in the challenges?

Answer: Heads (avatars), feet (digital footprint)

Once you are starting to create online, you often need to have a special identity. This is usually in the form of an avatar. You created them for World Maths Day, you have them in Facebook and, of course, you have them when leaving comments on blogs. So, this week’s activities relate to avatars and online identities including creating a positive digital footprint.

Students

Activity 1 – make an avatar

Step 1. Create an avatar for your blog and for you to use when leaving comments.

Avatars are a representation of yourself. Check out this post about avatars.  Create your avatar using one of the websites below. Sue Waters from ‘The Edublogger‘ has written a great post about avatars, including giving instructions on how to save them and then upload to an ‘Edublogs’ blog. Many of the sites mentioned below are included in her post.

Most important is remember to save as a jpeg file if using Edublogs.

MyHero[1] avatar2 avatar3 avatarbig

Any age can use these avatar sites:

From abi-station:

But over 13, need parental or guardian permission for these.

14 or older with parental permission

Step 2. Using printscreen to save your avatar

So you decided to create an avatar like “Hero Factory” or “Build your wildself” or “Mini Mizer” where you can’t save it easily. You need to take a picture of the screen first. Most computers have a printscreen button on the keyboard or if using Windows 7 you have an icon called “snipping tool”.

When you press printscreen an image of your screen is now copied to your clipboard. You will still need to crop and resize to get an avatar that fits well on your blog.

Open MS Paint and click control V to paste your image from the clipboard. To save, you need to go to File>Save As> change the name of the file to yourname with ava eg  sueava then underneath change the file type to JPEG. Make sure you save your avatar to your drive.

Go to your drive, right click on the icon for your avatar image and choose “Open with” choose MS Picture Manager.

In the icons at the top, go to View> task pane.  On the right go to edit pictures > crop.  Now move the black bars on the side of your image in, to crop your picture to what you want in your avatar.

Click OK, then back to edit pictures. Now click on resize. In the box “custom width and height” put  97 in both boxes. These numbers might be slightly different but one has to be 97 and the other smaller than 97. Click OK.

Back up to file>save as> call it sueava2 or similar> make sure it is still JPEG. Make sure you have saved it to your drive again.

Step 3. Upload avatar to your Edublogs blog

Now to upload to your blog.  Go to your dashboard> users>your avatar> browse to find your image on your school H drive>alternate upload.  This is your comment avatar.

Now for your blog avatar. Dashboard>appearance>widget> blog avatar drag to your sidebar.  To upload the avatar, dashboard>settings>blog avatar> browse to find your image on your school H drive>alternate upload. Go to your blog page and refresh. Your blog avatar should appear on your blog now.

If it now looks like a black coloured square then you haven’t cropped the image to the correct size in step 2 using printscreen. Or maybe you didn’t save the image as a JPEG in step 2 using printscreen.

Step 4.  Linking avatar to blog URL

Lastly, to make sure your avatar is linked to your blog URL, go to dashboard> users> profile and make sure you have a nickname and your blog URL is in the website box. This means whenever you leave a comment, the reader will just have to click on your name or avatar and it will take them to your blog. Include the http:// part in the URL.

Activity 2 – Write a post describing your avatar.

How much does it look like you? What sort of personality does your avatar have? What makes it typically you? Remember to include your avatar as an image in your post.

Activity 3 – Create a slideshow or gallery of avatars

You really enjoyed creating your avatar on line. Create them for your family or multiple versions of yourself. Now put them in a slideshow using animoto, smile box or photopeach. Or use the gallery format on Edublogs. Are there any other great slideshow tools you could use?

Activity 4 – What is a digital footprint?

Watch this video, then write a post about what might be included on your digital dossier or digital footprint.

  • What sites have you joined?
  • How much information did you give them when you joined?
  • Have you filled in more than the *asterisk questions?

Google your name or nickname but include your town as well.

  • What did you find?
  • Are you on the web for sports teams, named in newspapers and where else?
  • How many cookies or footprints are you leaving behind?

Classes

Activity 1 – Create a class avatar slideshow similar to activity 3 for students.

Activity 2 – Create a class poster or video about your commenting guidelines

Commenting is one part of our digital footprint, so it is important students know how to comment in an appropriate way.

Activity 3 – Involve parents in leaving comments on your class blog

  • How many parents are involved in your class blog?
  • Do they check it out regularly or is the blog just something you and the students do at school?
  • How could you involve parents more in the blogging process?

Kathleen Morris and Linda Yollis have some great ideas about involving parents or grandparents. Check out this handout about blogging, navigating the class blog, family blogging month winner and grandparents comment.

Next week we look at global activities getting ready for Earth Hour at the end of March.

122 thoughts on “Heads and feet Challenge 2-March 2011

  1. Konnichi wa! I know this is an old challenge. BUt what’s so wrong with Manga Face Maker? I found nothing inappropriate about it.. and I did not find anything that parents would disagree with.

  2. Hi there,
    I am having difficulty getting my Animoto to show. I sent it to YouTube, and same problem.

    This is how I did it:
    Copied the HTML code,clicked on the “HTML” tab in our Edublog, pasted the code. Published the page.

    When I viewed it, nothing showed up.

    In the meantime, I’ve placed a link.

    Do you have any suggestions for me?

    Kind regards,
    Tracy

    1. Tracy,
      Is your class blog one of the free Edublogs blogs because remember they don’t accept a lot of HTML code? Did find the animoto in your blogspot blog instead.

        1. Tracy,
          When you are in your Edublogs dashboard, there is a Pro+ section. Click on that and there should be instructions I think on how to upgrade your blog.

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    1. Zachary,
      No self promotion on this blog. To get visitors coming to your blog, you need to go out to other student blogs and leave great comments, not just ‘Check out my blog.’

  5. We now have a welcome post for parents. I also created a Family page with the same info. We have our comment guidelines established and are practicing on partner pages. We do not yet have avatars because there is only so much time: I teach writing, not computers or tech, so time is short for creating avatars. I’m sorry if we have not kept up — I started late, and didn’t quite understand what to do until Miss W wrote on our blog! Thank you for explaining.

    Welcome Families
    Family Page
    Comment Guidelines

    1. Aisling,
      If you look on the challenge blog down the right hand sidebar to the ‘Get Help’ section, you will find a link to ‘Blogspot help here’. This is a blog written by a teacher in New Zealand who gives lots of clues on adding bling to your Blogger blogs. Hope this answers your question.

    1. Quinn,
      You haven’t left the URL of your blog here so I can go and visit. Go to your dashboard> users > your profile and fill in the area called website with the URL of your blog. Remember to include the http:// bit as well.

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  7. When you geta cluster map and you delete it on accident can you bring back all the dots from were people have visited it?

    1. G’day,
      I think if you go back to clustrmaps and sign in again with your username and password they should have your map that your can embed again.

    1. Alejandro,
      I visited your blog and it looks like you worked out how to add the avatar to your blog anyway. Perhaps a post I could link to next time, telling others how to add avatars to weebly.

        1. G’day Connor,
          It is up to you and your teacher. Your school might have certain requirements about having avatars, so check with your teacher.

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