Cartoons and Puffins, the Magical Media

Embedding Media

OK, here I go again, spending way too much time having fun with all the new webapps available! ToonDoo and Blabberize were both very entertaining!

My post will be a short one today because I have been writing other posts about my blogging addiction, my genius students and former genius student.

I love teaching and learning! So much to learn, so little time. I could stay up all night again learning new things in Activity 6 of the Kick Start Your Blogging Teacher Challenge, but I must go to bed. That way I can start dreaming about Activity 7 and widgets, which just came out.

Photo: By the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service – Northeast Region. They have made it available with an Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) license. That means I was free to share and remix, which I certainly did. The puffin in the original photo was very stately and handsome, and he wasn’t blabbering at all.

I’ve also included a couple previously-created embedded media. I use SchoolTube to upload my videos. I like it best because all the videos are uploaded to a school site, with teacher moderators.

Prezi is an awesome webapp. I’m still trying to figure it out. That non-linear feature has so much potential! Here is one attempt.

Avatars: Big Blue Creatures or Picassoheads?

Avatars. What are they? I had never given much thought to them until 2009 when the movie Avatar came out. I thought avatars were the little pictures we use to represent us on webpages, but then I saw that they were big blue critters. I was confused for a time, as I often am these days learning a new digital language. This post is about the little pictures I use to represent myself, not the James Cameron avatar.

I have one colorful picture that I use as an avatar for everything.

My Picture
My Picture

I do like that I have a familiar web presence. When I search for my username, I see much evidence that I am out there. Even on a Google image search, my colorful picture comes up–along with dozens of other unrelated images, of course.

For my colorful photo avatar I used Photo Booth on my MacBook. I do prefer a photo because I like to be a “real” person commenting on others’ posts. However, I like this playful image because it doesn’t look too stark or exactly like me, with all my middle age imperfections.

Just for fun, for this blog challenge I did create a new avatar. It was made on Picassohead.com. What fun to create! It is just another reminder to me that the world is having so much fun creating and using all these cool sites.

The Picassohead resembles me, with the one green eye and crooked lips. Not really :).  Actually, my hair is about the same length and color as on my Picassohead.

Every time I do something new on my blog,  my students have fun looking up the new websites and trying for themselves. I’m sure they will certainly want to check out the new ways listed below to create their own avatars.

Picassohead

Voki

Lego Avatar

Portrait Illustration Maker

Picassohead
Picassohead