In this recipe, you are going to provide students with a poem to be changed into a cartoon. It will be a great activity because you will have different versions of the same poem changed into a cartoon. It is a great way for them to explore another way of writing because cartoons are a way of writing dialogues. We are going to divide the activity in two parts as done in the previous recipe. The first part is the reading of the poem and the second one is the writing of the comic strip.
First, we have to choose the website where we want our students to read the poem. In previous chapters, we have already worked with poems. So now we are going to use a different website. In this case, I found a very interesting website devoted to Christmas, which provides Christmas carols, Christmas songs, and Christmas poems. I have chosen a poem by Clement Clarke Moore called Twas the Night before Christmas. You are free to select any other poem or piece of writing that you want your students to turn into a cartoon.
After selecting both the website and the poem that we want our students to work with, we are going to create a link to a website so that students can read the poem. To perform this activity in a very simple and quick way, these are the steps that you have to follow:
- Click on Add a resource and select Link to a file or web site.
- Complete the Name block.
- Complete the Location block inside Link to a file or web site. In this case, the URL is http://www.carols.org.uk/twas_the_night_before_christmas.htm.
- Choose New window in Target, as shown in the next screenshot:
- Click on Save and return to course.
After creating the link to the website, we are going to ask our students to change the poem into a cartoon. Therefore, we can provide them with powerful tools from our beloved Web 2.0, which caters for a variety of ways to do so. We are going to develop this activity in Offline activity within Assignments so that students can design it. And they would feel more comfortable with its usage. They can even draw a comic strip with Microsoft Word or OpenOffice as we have already designed in earlier chapters. So let's Moodle it.
These are the steps that you have to follow:
- Click on Add an activity and select Offline activity within Assignments.
- Complete the Assignment name block.
- Complete the Description block and create the links to the websites as shown in the following screenshots:
- In both cases, click on OK and select New window in Target.
- Click on Save and return to course. The activity is ready for your students to work with!
Students may "cartoonize" themselves and insert their cartoonized picture in the comic strip. There are several websites that can be used for this purpose. Some websites ask you to pay in order to get the cartoonized picture. In others, you can have it freely created.
Enter the following website: http://www.befunky.com/ and click on Get Started. Next, click on Create and select Photo effects. Then browse for the picture that you want to cartoonize or add effects and upload it. In the next screenshot, I have chosen the second effect. There are some effects that have to be paid for, though others are free. The following screenshot shows what you can do with a picture:
The following software is another tool available to convert photos to cartoons. You can download a free trial from http://www.caricaturesoft.com/download.html. The photo will appear as shown in the following screenshot:
The image on the left is the picture and the image on the right is my cartoonized picture! I did not change the settings much. There is a tutorial that leads you through how to change the image, though only the three steps indicated before are necessary to do it.