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

Digital Citizen Cards

This project idea came from a monthly challenge put out by Adobe Express. We have the free EDU version deployed in our district and I thought this might be fun to try with a class. I liked that there was a prize element where the students could win a classroom set of hero cards  and it tied in with Digital Citizenship Week (October 17-21).  I teamed up with an elementary technology lab teacher and we decided to try it with one fifth grade class.  We looked over the available templates and decided we liked the layout of the 6-8 template the best (because they had to list advice for staying safe online).  One of the best things about these Adobe monthly challenge templates is that they can be modified. The revised template can then be sent to students via a link or through Google Classroom.  All the templates for this challenge Adobe gives you a sample template with sample wording but we wanted students to come up with their own wording. Neither one of us was ke...
Post a Comment
Read more

Secret Messages - How To (Light and Color)

This was fun activity that I got from Roper Mountain Science Institute. They suggested red theater gel to reveal the message, which can get pricy. Another idea I heard was to ask movie theaters to donate left over 3D glasses, which also have a red filter. A guest speaker we had last year said red jello would work. Tried it this week and it worked like a charm. The students thought it was very cool. I found my "attention challenged" students had trouble focusing on making their own secret messages so I was very glad that I had made extra copies of the sheets from the GEMS Color Analyzer book that they could color and then check under the jello.
2 comments
Read more

Random Idea - Website Domain Name

For the past two years I have purchased a yearly subscription to a stand alone website (School World) which I love. I did this because our district was using a very nonuser friendly website for its teachers and I was tired of not being able to do what I want with the website they had given me. I got the idea of a separate website from one of my son's teachers who had done the same thing years ago, she used a different teacher website then School World but it was the same principle. The yearly subscription rate for my own website was $35 and was extremely reasonable. I simply provided a link on my district website to my new site. The district did not have a problem with this. Several teachers were doing it. I am one of these "don't ask...don't tell" teachers so even if there was a problem I wasn't going to find out about it :) Last year the rest of the fourth grade team purchased subscriptions to the site as well. We also purchased our own domain names throug...
1 comment
Read more