Image,Character & Drawing Tools

On this post I have included the image, character and drawings tools found free and online.

Build Your Wild Self













This is great image generator found at http://www.buildyourwildself.com/

Students select all different aspects of their 'wild self'. They can choose between having a variety of human or other parts.

My creation is fast as a lion, with strong arms of a Gorilla and wings to fly. Yet I also kept bit of myself, as I still need glasses.

This software links to studies of the environment and animals and even a word study.

Your character is given an scientific name and you are also given facts about the animals which you have drawn from. In this case I was told facts of the African lion, Western low land Gorilla and the Californian Condor. Given this information, students could do a study of each of these animals. The teacher could specify that they want to know about each animals habitat, food, threats etc.
It could be a engagement to a writing piece, a research assignment, an art presentation, a lead up exercise to a zoo or aquarium excursion or just a way for students to creatively respond.

Reasonably Clever
This website is found at www.reasonablyclever.com

On this website is a lot of content, but to be safe, there is a 'classic kid safe mini-mizer' page. Just click the link from the top.

In this is a similar concept except instead of creating your wild self you create your own Lego man. You should remember to use real Lego as well as there is no replacement for the benefit of tactile /kinesthetic learning.

Lessons coming out of this could be building lessons, a warm up to a space/volume/capacity class involving Lego.
At the beginning of the year when you are trying to implement a set of classroom values this activity could be used and it could link to a discussion about community. In the same way it could link to lessons on civics and citizenship.



Sketch and Swap
This can be found at www.sketchswap.com
It is a online drawing website that through the use of a mouse you can draw a sketch.
The interesting thing about this website is that after you are done you get someone elses sketch drawn on your screen, evidently the 'swap' part.

Unfortunately this uncertainty means that you don't know if unsuitable images are going to be returned back. As such I wouldn't use it in the classroom without specific permission.

It would be used to develop students artistic ability, namely line and shape. Specifically as you see the 'swap' sketched virtually on your screen in real time.

As you can see from the images on the left my sketching skills of a boat pale in comparison to the mountain scene I got in return.





Rebus stories

Making story using pictures in place of some words is an activity that is easy to do. Using word, students can write their own story, you could specify what type of story or what it should include. Students then can easily insert images from clip art or elsewhere. Stories can be printed off or viewed on the computers. To make animated gif's to work the student will need to publish the word doc to web.

It is a different way to do writing and some student may really flourish, where they haven't in the past. See above a rebus story I put together in a 3 or so minutes.

As an extension is creates interesting word activity, where different meanings could be used to change the story. It leads into strategies that successful readers use such as predicting, inferring using prior knowledge connections etc.