Making this bitmoji virtual classroom for my students was so much fun! Google Slides makes it simple to create, and easy to share with my class. Here is a quick tutorial on how to make your own interactive virtual classroom!
To be honest… I am getting a bit tired of Google Classroom. I think my students are, too! This offers a fun, personalized, and colorful way to send work and information to my students.
Use your virtual classroom every day, on days when you need a substitute, or just as a fun change to the normal routine!
To make your own interactive virtual classroom, open Google Slides and use a blank slide. Click on the ‘Explore’ button in the bottom right of the screen. Do a search for ‘floor and wall background.’ Select your favorite!
If you are not happy with any of these, you will find many more options by doing a google search outside of Google Slides. Save the image on your computer and then insert it into your slide by clicking Insert → Image → Upload from computer.
But why settle for walls? Maybe you want an outdoor classroom! In the rainforest! At the beach! On the moon!
Now you are ready to fill your space. I found just about everything I needed for my room using the Explore image search from inside Google Slides. Many images already come with a transparent background, ready to go right into your classroom scene.
Some objects, I searched for in Google. If the object you want has a background, you can easily get rid of it by going to remove.bg, a free online image editor.
Here, you can upload a picture and it will remove the background! Download the image, and once saved to your computer, you can insert the object into your Google Slide!
What kinds of things can you put in your bitmoji virtual classroom?
Anything you can dream of!
- Posters, art, or decorations on the walls
- Banners hanging from the ceiling
- School supplies: staplers, markers, crayons, colored pencils, lined paper, notebooks, binders, text books
- Student desk
- Computer, laptop, phone, iPad
- Subject specific supplies: dictionary, globe, maps, instruments, models
- Class pet
- Items related to a theme of the month or week – planets, animals, plants, math models, objects from history
- Magical things like dragons, unicorns, rainbows, clouds, shooting stars!
If you want your students to access information in a particular order, consider adding numbers somewhere in your room. You can put a number on each sticky note on the board, or anywhere! Add numbers (or any text) by clicking the text box tool (Insert → Text Box) and then clicking in the slide where you want your text to be.
Put Yourself in Your Virtual Classroom With Bitmoji
I love having my bitmoji in my interactive virtual classroom. This gives a personal touch, and is a great place for students to click and hear a message from me. If you have a SnapChat account, then you probably already have a bitmoji.
I did not! And that is okay. It is simple to make one!
On your phone or tablet, get the bitmoji app and follow the steps to create your own bitmoji (it is really fun!).
Once your bitmoji is made, there is one more step before putting into your Google Slide.
In order to use your bitmoji image on your computer, you will need this: the bitmoji chrome extension. Follow the instructions to install the chrome extension (you must use Chrome as your web browser for this!). When done, you will see the bitmoji ion in the upper right of your Chrome browser. Click on it, and choose your image! Right click to copy the bitmoji you like, and then paste into your Google Slide!
Click HERE to get fully editable virtual classroom templates to use right away!
Most of the bitmojis are silly, or have words around them. I simply chose one and cropped out the words. You can also do a search for “on the beach” or “floating”, “sitting” etc. and get some good ones!
Don’t want a bitmoji? That is okay! You can find a ‘teacher’ image – or have no teacher in your scene at all!
Make it interactive!
Now that you have your classroom image, it is time to make it interactive!
First, you can click on any object in your scene, and assign a URL to it. Select the object, and go to Insert – Link.
Do you want just part of an object to be a link? Use the shape tool to make a shape in that location on the object. Make the shape transparent, with a transparent border. Follow the same steps to assign it a URL.
What URLs will you link to your classroom?
- Link a video of you giving instructions to your bitmoji!
- Add the link the day’s assignment to the white board!
- Link a Padlet to the sticky notes image!
- Put a Webquest, FlipGrid, Sutori or ThingLink assignment to the computer image!
- Link an assessment to the stack of books!
- Link a Turn In Google Form to the turn in basket! (Related: Use Google Forms to turn in digital work!)
Related: Looking for another fun way to communicate with parents and students next year? Check out ClassTag. It has tons of features plus you can earn supplies for your classroom!
Links are easy to change for each day or lesson.
Let your students explore the classroom to find all the links you have put there, or include instructions on where to look! The instructions can be inside the Digital Classroom (like the arrow over the turn in basket) or separate instructions on another slide. If you keep things consistent, students will come to know where to look for the links they need!
Either way it is always good to include extra links just for fun! Maybe to a silly gif or interesting YouTube clip. Keep them engaged by moving and changing the fun links each day/week!
Share with your Students:
Sharing your Bitmoji Virtual Classroom is super easy. Share right through your Google Classroom, or give your students access to the share link though email or on your own class website. Be sure you set the share to ‘view only’ so that your students can not move things around the room.
Or, publish your classroom to the web! Go to File, Publish to Web, and click Publish. You will get a link which you can share with your students. It will look like THIS – and will automatically update each time you change something on the Google Slide.
One more idea! To make it easier for my students to get right to the digital classroom, I made a tiny url that could be easily remembered and typed into their computer or phone: tinyurl.com/MrsParkerRoom.
To make your own, head over to tinyurl.com and enter your digital classroom published link, or share link (be sure it is view only!) and choose your own alias (all in the blue box). It may take a few try’s to get a URL that is not already taken (MrsParkersRoom was taken…) but the effort is worth it!
Related: Simple ways to connect and build relationships with your students while distance learning.
I used the template of the one you created. However, I was unable to use the whole image in my google classroom. I saved it as a picture and when I went to set is as the image in my classroom I had to crop it. Can someone please HELP!!!
Hello Lois! I am thinking that you may have extended some of your classroom beyond the borders of the Google Slide, so that when it is viewed in Presentation mode, whatever is outside the border is cut off. Try going into your Google Slides classroom and clicking View –> Present, if there are parts of your room that you do not see, it is because they are off the edge of the page. To fix it, just pull your images in until they are on the page! I hope that helps. Please feel free to email me if things are still looking weird! ScienceOfCuriosity@gmail.com
When creating a virtual classroom in Google Slides, is there a way to share it to students just a presentation? My teachers are worried about the items in the classroom being moved and edited by students. Is there a way to lock everything down?
That is a great question! You can share the slide in ‘view only’ by clicking the Share button and adjusting the settings. Provide students with the view only link and it will come up as a Google Slide but they will not be able to move anything around – but they will be able to click on any links you have included.
I prefer to Publish the slide to the web – to do this, go to File, Publish to web. Do not worry about the options to “repeat slide every 3 seconds” (since there is only one slide) – just click Publish and it will give you a link. Give this link to your students – it will look like this! Any updates you make on the slide will automatically update in the published version too.
I published my bitmoji classroom to the web, copied the link, and then posted in my google classroom. I clicked in to test it out and some of the links stopped working after I published the slide to the web. Do you have any ideas/tips/solutions? Thank you so much for sharing your expertise!!
Jensen – I really don’t know what could be happening. I have not had any trouble myself with links breaking between the Google Slide and the Published link. I was wondering if maybe it was a browser or device issue, but I just played around with my test classroom on my phone, iPad, Chrome, and Firefox – everything worked. I wish I could help!
How do I put a link in that will take the student to their google classroom for an assignment? When I have tried to do this, the link takes them to my google classroom page. Thank you!
Sherry, each students’ Google Classroom has a unique URL, so a single link from your Virtual Classroom can not lead the to their own Google Classroom. You can link them to a set of instructions (say on a Google Doc) that tells them to go to their Google Classroom to then access a particular assignment.
If I create an assignment doc that is given to individual students will the link in my virtual classroom allow this. I don’t want students being able to work on the same doc.
Shavonda, great question! I am guessing you mean a Google Doc (or Slides)?
You can link students to a ‘view only’ version of the document. When you click ‘Share’, you will see settings under “Get Link” – you want it to be set ‘anyone with link’ and just be sure it is set to ‘viewer’. When students click on this, they will see your original without being able to edit it. From there, to make their own copy, they simply go to File and Make a Copy. They can then edit this copy and turn it in to you when it is done. You can also make a document link that forces a copy automatically, check out this blog post to see how (Google has changed the way things look a bit since this post was made, but it is the same concept).
Either way you do it, you will want an organized way for students to share their work with you. Take a look at THIS blog post for an easy way for students to share their documents without you having to search though your email to find them!
i need to make a bitmoji account for my students
Hello! When creating the slide, it looks great, but when I go to full screen, one of the images is removed (a map of the US, with an embedded link). Any ideas?
That is very strange! I guess I would try a different map image and see if that works?
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Hi, how do you make a virtual classroom editable? So if I was sending to one student to allow them to make it their own? But I don’t want them to be able to edit mine if that makes sense, so they will have the same layout as me but when they edit the one I send them, mine will remain the same? Thanks
How do you get images to put in the google classroom like banners
Angel, most of the images I used can be found by clicking the ‘Explore’ tab side Google Slides (bottom right corner, looks like a star inside a box). Search for whatever image you are looking for. It helps to include ‘transparent background’ in your search to find one without a background. Hope that helps!