Create Your Lego Avatar

Having an avatar (some kind of representation of yourself) can be pretty handy both for you and your students. It's a good way to protect your students' identity if they are becoming part of an online community and helps reduce the amount of unwanted attention that some very attractive students might get from having their real image on a site.


Mini-Mizer 3.0 is a really nice way to get your students creating avatars. It's really easy to use and they can quickly click through the various options for customising the basic blank figure.

They can add various extras and backgrounds as well as changing all the features of the face. They could try to make the avatar look like themselves or totally different. When they are finished they will just need to take a screen grab of the image and then they can use is it when ever they create online profiles on any social type sites.



You can also use Mini-Mizer 3.0 in classes to develop language of description.

• You could write some brief descriptions of people and get students to try create an avatar of them.
• You could describe a famous person, get the students to create an avatar and then guess who the famous person is. The students could decide which avatar looks most like the celebrity.
• Students could work in pairs, one with an image that they describe but don't show while the other listens / asks questions and tries to recreate an avatar version of the image.
• Students could create avatars of someone in the class and the others could try to guess who it is.

Mini-Mizer 3.0 is a simple free fun tool, that particularly younger students are likely to enjoy using and which can be used to help protect your students' identity. I hope you enjoy it.

Related links:

• Flickr and Wiktionary Based Image Dictionary
• Image based activities
• Exploiting Travel Images
• Art Photography as a Basis for Language Activities
• Darwin and Evolution
• Create Image Books
• Create a Flickr Montage
• Great Time Line Tool

Best

Nik Peachey