Design | education | technology | ai & NOT A.I. | design

Create comic strips like a Pro

Less than 2 minutes is all it took me to make the above comic strip. The learning curve using stripgenerator.com is low. The options are seemingly endless. The ability for teachers to use this in their classroom at a low age is high. There is a “like” factor for kids. Why not explore it for yourself. I have listed some of the abilities with this all-in-one website below.

Strip Generator allows for different types of:

frames
characters (plus you can build your own)
items (like tvs, hats, books, toys, instruments and so much more)
text (and text bubbles)

Everything can:

be rotated
be re-sized
be arranged front to back
blurred
have its opacity changed

When you finish you can tag, print, share on Facebook and Twitter, embed on your website or blog, or even join with other strips you have made to create a booklet. The website is very intuitive. I can see many uses for it in education and give it 5 out of 5 stars as a resource.

So you want a Resource within a Resource, huh?

17 May

August 16th, 1970 is the birth of the Internet
September 19th, 1982 we see the first emoticon 🙂 introduced by Scott E. Fahlman
April 1996 is the advent of the first webcam girl with Jennycam
June 13th, 2006 lolspeak comes into mainstream through I Can Has Cheeseburger?

The reason I mention the preceding internet memes is because I feel like I have found an excellent resource within a resource which these are just a glimpse of.

The first resource is www.dipity.com. It is a website that is made for creating timelines and its easy. Its social, which means that you can follow other people, recommend them, and comment on their timelines.

Within that resource is a timeline created by tatercakes that goes much more in depth about internet memes than what I have done. As a technology teacher, I think it is really neat and useful timeline. It has been viewed 4309304 times and can be found here.

Go beyond just viewing tatercakes timeline. Search for others that might interest you. Be a part of the web and create your own timeline for others to share, recommend and comment on. Possibly your timeline might become the next internet meme that tatercakes will be adding to his timeline in the future. 🙂

2 Comments

Posted by Dr. Thomas Johnson | ict-design.org on May 17, 2011 in Design, Education, Technology

Tags: I Can Has Cheezburger?, Internet meme, Know Your Meme, Lolcat, Timeline

I want that.

09 May

Bento box from Fujitsu. I didn’t know I needed this before, but now I can’t see how I can live my life without it. I was writing posts about the 3:1 ratio that people need for the future, and now it seems that Fujitsu has heard what I was saying. From my understanding everything works in sync with itself: the notepad holds everything; the tablet becomes the keyboard; and the smart phone is the track-pad; plus more. Its sleek.

As we all know with technology, the first versions of everything are always cool, but I wonder what other companies have up their sleeves along these lines. I agree with the jump article which states tactile touch keyboards have something that a digital surface is missing. All in all though, I like it.

If you don’t consider “The Cutoff” you’ll hate yourself later

07 May

This is important if you are a blogger and you use Facebook to publish. After the Headline of your article, the next most important characters you write are the following 280. This is the “Facebook Cutoff”. Without getting people interested in your article in this amount of time they are not going to click on the link to see the rest of your article and hopefully peruse (read intensely) through your blog.

So, how do you do it?

Put the important information up front. Newspapers have been doing this for a long time, you can too. Look back at an article to see how they are doing it.

Don’t tell people something they already know. Why do they need to read the rest of the article if everything they are seeing is something they have already read before or is something they concluded about themselves.

Now, here is the interesting part: Test to see the sentence getting cut off at 280 characters is leaving someone yearning for more. Test the length in Facebook. Have you done so well that you have put ALL the important information in the first 280 characters that readers do not feel they need to read any further to gain insight? If so, rework the article.

Finally, do something I didn’t do in this articles headline, and ask a question. It might generate people commenting on the article, as they have thought about their response since they read the title.