Virtual Open House Video and Bitmoji for the Classroom

I jumped on the Bitmoji craze and created my version of a virtual library to share with students. We are now starting remote on Aug. 17th and as the media specialist, I wanted to give students quick access to many ebooks and websites. 

If you need more direction on how to create a bitmoji classroom, you should just search youtube for a tutorial. So many tutorials are out there!

I also put a link to the public library for my area so they could connect with them and gain access to the public library resources as well.

One BIG TIP I have for if you would like to make a Bitmoji Classroom, would be to not limit yourself to only the images you can find when doing a web search that have a transparent background. ANY image you find can have a transparent background if you upload the image to the website remove.bg and then download the new image. I used this to get the perfect purple library cart that matches the library carts that I use in my own library. 

I also used in on the bitmoji images to remove backgrounds when I created the google slide above that shows each special teacher's bitmoji. We are going to have classes go to this slide and then click on the bitmoji to join their google meet special for the day. A fellow media specialist shared the background with me that had the windows, but I added the purple and yellow flower window boxes to match our school colors. I've also heard of school using this concept with doors instead of windows. 

One other tip would be that if you do not want to use a bitmoji, but would rather the virtual classroom show an actual picture of you, you can use the website remove.bg to remove the background around an image of yourself. To take it one step further, my husband teaches 7th grade science and he took a video of himself waving and then uploading the video to www.unscreen.com and it automatically removed the background of the video and put the video on loop. He then put this video onto his virtual classroom.

I used this same concept on my Virtual Open House video.

I used google slides to create the presentation and then added gifs of myself. I created the gifs by taking a short video of myself waving or holding cats and then uploaded the video to unscreen.com to remove the background. I then downloaded the new image from unscreen.com and was able to drop the images into the google slide. After I complete the google slide presentation I used www.loom.com to record myself talking while presenting the google slide in presentation mode. This turned my presentation into a video with audio and students/parents will not have to click for the slide to advance. Loom is free for educators it is similar to screencastify and other screen recording options. One thing I really liked about it is there is a spot to add a "Call to Action" link within the video. So, I was about to add a button where people could click that and go to a link that I mentioned while watching.