Many teachers struggle to find new ideas for creating a positive classroom culture. They want to have an inclusive classroom that promotes diversity and respect between themselves and their students, but cannot seem to think of concrete ideas to implement this. It can be very difficult to show personality in a classroom (both online or in person) when you narrow a classroom down to curriculum, but there are many ways that educators can make class more fun with visuals or online resources.
Today we would like to show you one way to help boost your classroom culture by creating a Bitmoji ™ Classroom. First of all, what the heck is a Bitmoji™? Bitmoji™ is an app that you can download onto your smartphone and create fun cartoon (avatar) versions of yourself.
Take a look at our tech team avatars:
Want to learn more? Keep reading!
- If you haven’t done so already, download the Bitmoji™ app onto your smartphone or other smart device.
- Create your unique avatar.
- Start exploring the app to see the fun ways your avatar can be used.
Now that you have created your own avatar, here is a little more in depth explanation:
Bitmoji ™ classrooms are cartoon scenes that you can create using your Bitmoji™ avatar and pictures you find online. These classroom scenes can be used in a variety of ways, including:
- Morning announcements
- Classroom Celebrations & Achievements
- Adding character to your Slide presentations
Here’s a visual for you:
As you can see from the above example, there are many fun things you can do to create a Bitmoji™ classroom scene. So let’s get started!
- The first thing we like to do when creating these scenes is to open a new Google Slides document (last week’s blog post covers how to do this). There are many ways to make your classroom scenes, but this is our preferred way because it is easy and you may already be using Google Slides anyway.
- Next, open a new tab on your web browser. Make sure you are using Google Chrome as your main web browser. Also, make sure you are on Google’s main page.
- In the search bar, type Bitmoji™ Chrome Extension.
- Follow the instructions to install the extension on your device.
- Once installed, you will be prompted to sign in using either your email or Snapchat handle…basically, sign in using whatever information you used when downloading the app onto your smart device earlier.
- Once you are signed in, you should see the following icon appear in the upper right corner of your web browser:
- Next, click on that icon and a drop down menu will appear. You will see many fun options to have your avatar do different things.
Now that you have enabled the Bitmoji™ extension, you need to create your classroom scene. This is the fun part!
- Open a new tab again and go to Google’s homepage. Search for Free Bitmoji™ Classroom Background Templates.
- Filter your results by clicking on the word Images, that way you can see the pictures of the templates.
- There will be many options, and not all of them will be free. There are some awesome sites dedicated to designing Bitmoji™ classroom backgrounds, and you are welcome to use them for a small fee if you are willing. However, for the purposes of this blog post, we will use a free template. Right click on one of the images you see in your search results.
- Select Save Image As… and then follow the prompts to save the image to your computer.
- Remember the Google Slideshow we opened earlier? Now is the time to go back to that.
- We recommend setting your main scene picture as the background of your slide. Do this by clicking on Background in the menu bar, Choose Image, then Upload.
- Once uploaded, your scene will be set as the background!
Now you can add your Bitmoji™ avatar to the scene or find other fun pictures or furniture to add to your scene based on how you want the scene to look.
Reminder: to find your Bitmoji™ avatar, click on the icon in the upper right corner of your screen. You will need to right click and copy the image that you want to put on your Classroom scene.
That’s it! Be creative and have fun with it! Your students will love to see these Bitmoji™ scenes in your classroom!