Last year I co-taught with a media specialist working to integrate technology into her related arts rotation.
We choose a different tool for each of the upper grade levels (3-5). For third we decided to use Google Drawings.
The inspiration for this project came from a picture in a tweet, It made me immediate think of a persuasive writing project that one of the teacher's was doing with her class that we could easily piggy back on.
I really liked the comic book style picture and reached out, via Twitter, to Todd Nesloney and Tony Vincent (who made the original tweet) and found that Tony used an expensive app called Prisma to get the effect.
We decided to use the free app PicsArt and one of their filters. It wasn't as clean as the picture we used as inspiration but the kids liked the graphic style of them. If you use the app you can find the filter under "effects" and then "artistic" and then "comic" (or you could try "cartoonizer").
Honestly we didn't really need to use the filter, it created some extra steps for us, but we became committed at some point. We had to pre-take all the pictures of the students in the correct pose (on our iPads) run them through the PicsArt app and then upload the finished pictures to a folder in Google Drive (which we shared with students...so they could get them).
Students were doing longer writing and research persuasive pieces in the classroom so we had them take their top three points and make a "persuasive poster". We worked with the classroom teacher so that the day we did the project they had their three main points on a sticky note. I roped in another tech coach to help so we had three adults "working the floor" helping (the Media Specialist, her assistant, and an extra tech coach). I modeled up front and helped as students worked independently.
We gave students a Google Drawing template in Google Classroom that was sized correctly. They then had to find their picture and stretch it to the canvas. They made a semi transparent shape at the bottom where they changed the font (I made them all use Happy Monkey...it gave them experience going to find "more" Google fonts) and type their topic in. I then had them make one speech bubble and had them change the default size, position (center) and font (still Happy Monkey) and had them duplicate the first speech bubble two times. They then fit the speech bubbles around them and typed in their three persuasive points. This took the entire 55 minute Related Arts block. The goal was to have it done in one class setting so we were feeling pretty successful (but we had done a lot of pre-work to set up the activity to run smoothly).
The students did an outstanding job and learned a lot of tech skills. I loved their persuasive points. This is one of those projects I would definitely do again!
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