10 Simple Steps to a Virtual Classroom
1 -- Don't Reinvent the Wheel
There are numerous Facebook groups, like Bitmoji Craze and Educators, and pages where other teachers are sharing their Bitmoji Classroom ideas. Many of these are FREE, so you can just grab a few that have items you like and blend them together. Why spend hours creating one from scratch when you can find everything you need in just a few clicks?!2 -- The Quick Bitmoji Tech Stuff
Once you have found a few that you like and want to use, you need to download them and share to your drive. You will want to change these images to powerpoint slides, so you can manipulate the pieces. At this time, all of the parts of the slide are movable, so you can delete those items you don't want and use or move around those you do.3 -- Make the Bitmoji Classroom Your Own
You can make the Bitmoji classroom look like your actual classroom at school, or a themed virtual fun room for your students. Still feel like something is missing? You can always search google for clipart of certain items you want/need in your room.
4 -- Classroom Done ✅, What's Next?
Now that you have created the classroom with all of the "furniture" to make it look special, you want to set it as a background. This protects the copyright of any images you purchased or created yourself. Once you have set the slide as a jpeg, all of those pieces are no longer movable and can't be "played with" by your students or parents. ?5 -- The Fun Stuff! ~ Student Interactive Items
Depending on the different apps that you are using to teach virtually, you will want to include those icons and link them to direct pages. Some I have seen are Clever, Google Classroom, Seesaw, Google or Zoom Meet button, book clipart, math symbols, etc. All of these are going to serve a purpose for your students, as clicking on them will take them to specific pages/sites they can use in their learning.6 -- Add Some Reading Rooms
While searching through the Facebook groups for Bitmoji classrooms, I stumbled upon "Reading Rooms". These are AMAZING! Most of them center around a variety of books by a certain author. Just link that page to your page and when students click on a certain image (mine is a stack of books), it automatically takes them to that reading room, where they can read any of those books. You can also take screen shots of certain book covers and paste them in your room, then link them to YouTube or StoryOnline readings of those books.
7 -- Make an Interactive Calendar
Create a calendar slide and set it as a background. Then add in all of the pieces you would like the students to be able to manipulate. Each day, they can follow along with you as you go over calendar wall. And if they happen to miss that live session, they can go into the Bitmoji Classroom later, click on the calendar link and create the calendar for the day themselves.
8 -- Bitmoji Word Wall and Other Activities
You can also create a word wall, where students can click on the word(s) you are learning and be taken to videos practicing that word, or resources students can complete to practice reading and writing that word. As you can see in the video, Jenn also created a "Build a Word" activity for her students. They can interact and build words while she sounds them out, or she can model words for them as they sound them out for her. You can also add literacy and math activities like this one for your students.
9 -- Get Your Bitmoji Classroom Out to Your Families
As I mentioned above, parents LOVE the simplicity of only having to remember ONE link for distance learning. In order to accomplish this, you are going to want to publish your Bitmoji Classroom to the web. Once you've chosen your link type (Jenn used bit.ly), and published it, you can send the link to your parents and your Classroom is now live on the web. The ease for you is that anytime parents have a question about anything related to school, you can simply refer them to your Bitmoji Classroom and they can find the information there. ?10 -- Stress Free Updates
Since you published your Bitmoji Classroom, and it is a live link, every time you go in and change or update anything from your end, it automatically updates for students and parents as well. How easy and stress free is that?!