Bitmoji Classrooms

Have you heard of the recent 'Bitmoji Classroom Craze' ? There's a host of educators on Twitter and Facebook getting pretty excited about it such as this 473,000+ community of members on Facebook. In our days of Zoom, Loom and gloom, this could be the pep-me-up that we all need - teachers and students alike!

This Edutopia article gives a great rundown of how different educators have used Bitmoji classrooms to build community and engagement such as creating libraries, explaining COVID-19 policy, expectations, developing growth mindset and so on.

I was very impressed by Bitmoji Classrooms' capabilities for students with special and additional learning needs as well as for neurotypical students, especially when I discovered Erica Brooks who is an award-winning SEL teacher in the US. Her presentation on how she uses Bitmoji with her students is very impressive, so I reached out to her and she very kindly sent me her Google Slides presentation with lots of resources to check out. 

As well as setting curriculum content for her students, she also has well-being spaces for them and an instructional space for parents. It’s worth watching her video presentation on the first slide as she talks through how she uses her Bitmoji classrooms.

Amanda Watson of ‘Mrs Watson Education’ explains how a Bitmoji classroom can be incorporated into Canvas or another LMS platform. CeCe Gaede also explains how to incorporate it into Seesaw. As Amanda Watson points out in her video, students often can’t read or find items in sidebar lists or don’t scroll down through them properly, but having images where they just point-and-click removes the necessity to navigate lists.

Katherine Panczner (link here) and Thomas Blakemore (link here) have great videos on on creating interactive Bitmoji Classrooms, Thomas' Bitmojis are even 3D in this tutorial!

So I had a go myself creating a simple one and here are the results. It took about two hours from downloading the apps and extensions to the final product. I thought I'd take a Developing Text Set theme on animals we use here in Hong Kong where examples of multi-modal texts have been set out (videos, books, songs) as well as other useful links to reading strategies, weather and action alphabet posters. Click on the window and it takes you to a relaxed yoga-style meditative space for children.

I’ve just made one slide here, but I could have duplicated this and amended in many different ways, uploading different topic-related content and activities.

Take a look around - hopefully it, and the other links I’ve posted, can inspire a leap into a new stratosphere of creativity.