Back in March, when the Pandemic hit and teachers, librarians, and other educators were scrambling to find creative ways to do remote learning, Bitmoji classrooms were born.
Bitmoji isn’t new. You can create a Bitmoji using either Snapchat or the Bitmoji app and by adding the Google Chrome extension you can insert Bitmojis almost anywhere. What was new was the use of Bitmojis to create virtual classrooms.
Bitmoji Craze for Educators is a Facebook Group that was created by Allatesha Cain in April of 2020 and now has almost 550,000 members. But what exactly is a Bitmoji classroom and why has it become so popular?
A Bitmoji classroom is a virtual space that has hyperlinks to educational videos, read alouds, websites, and more. Most are created using Google Slides and then used on an LMS system like Google Classroom, Google Sites, Schoology, and Seesaw. Creators typically create some kind of “room” and then decorate it with furniture, pictures, pets, classroom objects, book covers and more. Most of these items are then hyperlinked to some kind of on-line content. The Bitmoji itself is often the guide and “familiar face”. Some teachers have modeled their rooms after their own classroom while others have imagined totally new spaces.
I think teachers in the spring and then into the summer were looking for ways to get a lot of content into a small space and were looking for ways to be creative. Bitmoji classrooms can also be “fun” to create and we all needed fun during quarantine. As spring turned into summer, teachers were looking ahead to the possibility of continued remote learning and trying to envision new ways to interact with students.
I personally jumped on the Bitmoji bandwagon pretty early on. As a school librarian it gave me a new way to connect with my students and a way to creatively share the myriad of resources that I was finding. What I loved, was seeing what everyone else was doing and then learning new skills so I could do the same. I believe that has also been a side benefit to these rooms – teachers, librarians, and other educators have “upped” their technology game in a fun way.
So how can you use this in your library? I would first recommend joining and then browsing the Bitmoji Craze for Educators page. Feel free to check out my website as well. Youtube is also a great resource for learning “how-to”. Typing in “Bitmoji classroom” in the search will lead to hundreds of videos and ideas.