Skip to main content

Fun Staff Photos

 


With masking requirements being implemented across states, prior to the start of the 2021-2022 school year, I was looking for a creative way to share a department photo without actually having to put anyone in close contact. 

Last year I created a fun Brady Bunch style picture but I really like the comic book style this year. 


For anyone wishing to duplicate it there were a few steps. The first is obviously to get pictures of your team. I had some from previous years and I started stalking Facebook for some backups.

Once I had the pictures saved I emailed them to myself so I could open them up on my phone and save the pictures to my camera roll.

I used the app "Photo Lab" to "cartoon" the pictures. It is free with in-app purchases but you may have to wade through quite a few advertisements. I never paid for any features. It is not super intuitive to use so I made this short 2 minute video. 

I took screen shots of the finished cartoons versus saving to my camera roll and used the editing feature on my phone to crop around the pictures.  





After all the pictures were "cartooned" I emailed them all back to my laptop. From there I used the site remove.bg to get rid of the background.

I found a comic panel layout online that I liked with nine panels to use as the background (searching "9 Panel comic layout").  Once I had the panel in place I started inserting and tweaking the pictures using Google Slides. I would duplicate the slides so I could adjust a layout without losing the previous one. Honestly I could have created the background myself, and was prepared to do that, until I found a template I liked (which saved me a lot of time). If you have several people on your team/department Google image search "cartoon head shots" to see other layouts that could be used instead of a comic panel. 

The name tags I created using white text boxes with drop shadowing and the Google font "Naucha". These are skills I learned taking Tony Vincent's "Classy Creations" online course (which I highly recommend). 

I did run the finished product by my teammates allowing them to change pictures if they wanted and I got a lot of helpful suggestions. We typically share our back-to-school group picture on our EdTech and District Facebook page as well as on Twitter. 

If you create a similar layout I would love to see it! Please respond in the comments below or tag me on Twitter @atechcoachlife. 


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Picture of the Day - Activity

I attended a training class and a science coach shared an activity that he does with his students to help them differentiate between observations, inferences, and predictions. He puts a picture on the interactive white board as a warm up (he gets the pictures from a variety of sources but uses National Geographic's Picture of the Day a lot). The picture above is from the National Geographic site. He has the students make five observations. Then he makes the students make five inferences. Finally he has the students make five predictions. He does this every day and it really drives home the difference between those three key inquiry vocabulary terms. I've done this activity with both my sixth and fourth grade science classes and the students really got into it and became proficient at telling me the difference between those terms.
13 comments
Read more

Weathering, Erosion, and Deposition Activity

I saw this activity at a science conference years ago and haven't had a chance to use it in a classroom until this week (mainly because I didn't teach weathering, erosion, and deposition). It is a great way to reinforce the definition of the weathering, erosion, and deposition in a highly kinesthetic manner. Basically you break the students up into groups of three. One group is "Weathering" another group is "Erosion" and the third group is "Deposition". Add tape to the back because you are going to stick them to the forehead of the children in each group. The "weathering" students get a sheet of paper that is their "rock" they will be breaking down. At the start of the activity the "weathering" students will start ripping tiny pieces of their "rock" and handing it to the "erosion" students. The "erosion" students will be running their tiny piece of "rock...
5 comments
Read more

Bill Nye Songs with Lyrics

At the end of the Bill Nye videos he always has a fun song that goes with the episode. You can find many of the songs as stand alone videos on YouTube. This came in handy because today I am teaching a lesson on layers of the atmosphere and found a song from his Atmosphere video on YouTube titled "Fresh Aire." I really wanted to remix it and put the lyrics on the video (so the kids could sing along and see how the lyrics matched the lesson). The first thing I did was found a site that has all the Bill Nye lyrics posted used my YouTube downloader ( see instructions here ) and downloaded the song. I then imported the video into Movie Maker Live and used the caption feature to put the lyrics on the different frames (cutting and pasting from the lyrics site into Movie Maker Live). I saved the video and reposted to YouTube so other teachers could use the video with lyrics (the finished video is posted above). The process was pretty easy and I am thinking about doing it for more ...
Post a Comment
Read more