4th Grade Famous Virginians Come to Life!

Fourth graders at Davis Elementary have been learning about famous Virginians in the 20th century (VS.9d), so today we brought them to life with the magic of technology! First the students decided whether they wanted to work in groups or alone. This project, like any project that uses an online tool, goes a lot smoother if students are working in groups since less computers are using the bandwidth. Once they selected their group, they chose a famous Virginian and found an image of the person online. I explained that they needed a good clear photo of the person’s face looking straight ahead. Next we downloaded a screen recording Chrome extension called Screencastify. We would need this tool in the last step to record our videos. Now we were ready to go to SitePal where the real magic happens. We clicked “Create Your Own” talking avatar and uploaded the image of our famous Virginian. The site guides you through the process of animating the head. Then the students wrote a paragraph in the Text-to-Speech section with facts for the “talking head” to say. They also chose a voice. We used Screencastify to record the videos since there isn’t another way to save them. Finally they posted their videos to Google classroom so they could watch each others’. You can watch them too by clicking here.