Voki

Voki is a free service that allows you to create personalized speaking avatars and use them on your blog, profile, and in email messages.
Voki is a great tool for students to use to create a talking avatar. We have used Vokis with third graders doing a biography book report. They had to create a Voki of the character from their biography book. They stated facts about their character and ended with a "headline" about their character.
You are able to personalize the avatar's hair, skin color, clothes, and more! Many famous people are already created for you to use or you can personalize it in your own way.
Voki allows you to add your own voice via phone, microphone, text to speech or by uploading a file. Your have 60 seconds to record.
The Voki can be embedded into a website easily by copying the code. You can also email it to parents or friends!
Click here for FAQ about Voki. There is also a lesson plan database for using Voki located here.
If you have used Voli with your students, please leave a comment to share your ideas with everyone!

Scratch

Scratch is a programming language that makes it easy for students to create their own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share their creations on the web.

Scratch is available as a free download for Mac and PC computers.

Scratch is developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab.

Students can animate their own stories and games to enhance classroom curriculum. As young people create and share Scratch projects, they learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively.

Scratch projects can be put on the gallery and students can "remix" others' creations.


Here are more resources to help you learn the basics of Scratch:
Classroom 2.0 wiki Scratch page
Learn Scratch website
MIT Scratch Support

My StoryMaker

This is a great site to help kids create a story!
My StoryMaker lets you control characters and objects - and creates sentences for you! Once you are done with your story, you can print it out. You cannot go back and edit a story once you have ended it but, if you click "yes" when asked to share it with others, you can print it out again by entering the magic number it gives you in the box on the right. Stories are saved for one month...but you can save them as a PDF to keep forever.


I saw this site from a tweet from @Mray29. It was showcased at #TCEA.
I think this site has great potential for uses in elementary classrooms. Students select the scenery, characters, objects, and actions the characters do in their story. StoryMaker creates sentences for you or you can delete those and enter your own creations. It is VERY user friendly!
Check it out when you have time! If you have great ideas on how to use this with students, please comment below to share those ideas with others!

Arthur Comic Creator

This is a great site to use to create a comic based on the Arthur series by Marc Brown. It is web based and has the Arthur characters at the top to drag into your comic. There are other options to personalize your comic such as backgrounds, other objects to add, and conversation bubbles. This is a very easy site to use, so it could be used with younger students keeping it simple, or with older students and allow them to add various objects other than characters.

If you want to give your students a story starter, simply click the Story Starter button and click the lever. This gives your comic a background and characters and your students have to create a story about it.

This site also has a save option which saves your comic as a JPG file and allows your students to print their comic as well.