voki.com allows you to create free avatars to represent yourself or some other character which can then be embedded in a web page, a blog like this one, or even emailed. You can create avatars for free as long as you don't mind a bit of advertising shown at the bottom.
I see avatars as a great way of engaging children. Children have grown up in a digital society and to expect them to come to school and "power down" to read a text book is ridiculous when you think about it. We need to engage them using the multimodal texts that they are used to in life outside of the classroom. These texts are not just linguistic but also include the visual, gestural, audio and spatial (Healy, A. 2008. p9).
Above is an example avatar I created with my free voki account. As you can see avatars do not need to be human - you can use all sorts of characters.
Perhaps another use for them would be for students to create their own and use them to publish their opinion on a particular topic. This could be a way of engaging students who find getting up in front of the class very nerve-racking.
References
Healy, A. (2008). Multiliteracies and Diversity in Education. South Melbourne, VIC, Australia: Oxford University Press.
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