Creating avatar icons

I've started preparing for a collaborative project on a wiki my students are sharing with a class from Armenia. Parent permission forms are ready and I hope I'll have them back and all signed before the end of the week.

In the meantime I'll invite the students to join the wiki. When they join, they'll need pictures to represent them when they post. My students are only 14, so I thought of an activity 0 for them: creating avatar icons instead of personal photos.
I've just written a post on their blog sharing one idea on how to do it and inviting them to share if they know of a better, easier of more interesting way of doing it.

I've invited them to visit http://avatars.yahoo.com/ and choose a shape they like or think reflects their interests, or maybe even looks like them in a way.
When they create an avatar picture, they can right click it and save it.
For example:



To get a small picture of the avatar face, to use as an icon, for example when they are writing comments,I suggested resizing it: http://www.sherv.net/icon-maker/ It is easy, you just upload the picture, choose the part you like and save it again.

I've given them an example of what they can do with the picture:


I hope this will help my students create their avatar photos in no time and have fun.