Literature Playing Cards

I made these this week:



I've used papers before to sort students into groups at the start of class. Everyone either takes one as they come in or there is one at each desk. I did irreversible binomial chip flavours, ex. one person has "Salt and" the other has "Vinegar" and students had to find their partner. However; these were always hastily made before class (sometimes finished during!) and recycled shortly after. I wanted to make a permanent, more flexible solution.

Literature cards were born! This set is designed to have 36 cards, which divides easily into 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, and 12! I will shuffle them before class and give each student one to start and flexible grouping is a breeze.

• I want groups of four? Everyone pair up with people with the same number.
• Four large groups? Everyone make a group of the same suit.
• Groups of three? Ace to 3 of Hearts here, ace to 3 of Yodas here, etc.

The backs of every card are going to evenly, and randomly be made six different colours. These colours allow me to:

• Make groups of six.
• Have each colour represent a certain point of view to take when responding to a text

Since I will be teaching grade 9 and 10 English this year, I want to really get my students excited for all that the world of literature has to offer. With these cards I hope to introduce students to some iconic genres and characters from literature, and hopefully make them curious too!
The traditional four suits are replaced by four genres:

• Hearts - Romance. I chose to use Jane Austen characters and quotes.
• Yodas - SciFi/Fantasy. I love this genre. It excites the imagination and is filled with allegory and social commentary.
• Magnifying Glasses - Mystery/Detective. It's easy to be drawn into a Who-Done-It. Foreshadowing abounds and reading can easily be connected to the glut of crime procedurals on TV.
• Masks - Drama. I chose Shakespeare quotes and characters since he is The icon of drama. This is language as art in an ideally non-written form.

Each genre has three face cards:

• King - An influential male character.
• Queen - An influential female character.
• Joker - A fool/jokester.

I wanted to give equal weight to male and female so chose to use the joker instead of the jack, as the joker represents a different mode of being within the genre.

I will most likely have less than 36 students in my class and I'll tailor which cards I use to that number. If I have 28 students I'll remove the 5s and 6s for example.

I'm excited to give them a try. If you like the idea and want your own, click here and download them from my flickr set. They are creative commons, so please reference me and don't use them to make a profit.

Twitter Novel/Character Study

You may remember my enthusiasm for Literary Tweeters. I've started working on my courses for the upcoming year and here is the twitter activity I'm going to use with a novel study. The best tweets from each year will be used in a sporcle-style twitter review quiz for the following year. The twitter feed will be used to summarize the story and the extras: bio page, following, photos and videos, ads, recommended people and trending hashtags, will be used to shed light on the character they've picked to study. As an extension I would as students to make a "# Connect" page that follows one of the trending hashtags. This page would have people their character isn't following and would provide a different perspective on what is happening in the story. 

This project is similar to a facebook character study I made to use with Macbeth, however, this project is Word-based instead of using Publisher and is easier to use and modify. 

If you'd like a copy of the template click here.

My next project is going to be to use Word to update the facebook template to the Timeline layout.

8 bit drawing

I grew up playing the NES with great games like Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, and Blades of Steel and 8 bit art holds a special place in my heart.
Here are some great examples:

• Al Creed's NHL Jerseys
• Google Maps 8 Bit
• 8 Bit Gangnam Style

Seeing the amazing things people can do with pixels never fails to get my creative juices flowing. I wanted to make a Mario Bros. themed video featuring my brother and I, in honour of some of our travels, so I scoured the web for a way to create 8 bit avatars. I found 8bityourself.com, a promo-site for Linkin Park's 8 bit rebellion. It was pretty good. I made versions of my brother and myself and then tweaked them in paint since there were only preset skins to mix and match on the website. I found some screen shots of old NES games and added us in. Check it out.
I have now officially caught the 8 bit bug. I modified my avatar further and made an 8 bit blog header and blog button for ICTyler. I was playing around last night and thought that maybe a dedicated 8 bit drawing program existed somewhere on the internet. I searched a bit today. There was a program called PXLPNT, but its domain is for sale now, so I think it's gone belly up. However, I did find make8bitart.com, a site made by @jennschiffer.

Fittingly, it provides 8 preset colours and lets you save your work, already in a fancy frame. You can also add custom colours if you know their hexadecimal codes. After making a few calculations, I estimate the pixel size in the final product is 25 by 25 actual pixels. It's a good size, especially if you consider how small the picture would be if you were actually drawing with a 1 by 1 pixel brush. This is a great site to play with 8 bit drawing; however, I wanted a larger canvas for some of the projects I was working on.

So, I figured out another way: Microsoft Paint! The best part of that is everyone, well everyone with windows, already has it. The new version of Paint does not include a square brush, but it does have a square eraser. The eraser is technically not an eraser at all. It just paints your secondary colour whenever you click. It just so happens, that we often leave our secondary colour the same as our base canvas colour. By modifying the secondary colour I have an easy 8 bit painting tool. Unfortunately, the eraser does not snap to predetermined squares, like make8bitart does with its brush, so you have to be careful when drawing. I use the largest eraser setting to make a large square, but it's up to your preferences. Paint lets you chose canvas size so you can make your 8 bit drawing as large or as small as your heart desires.

Here's how it looks speeded up 12 times as I make my 50th picture for my Picture a Day project:

If you're inspired to make 8 bit art by this, using one of these tools or something else, send me the link in a comment or tweet me @Tyler_JL. I'd love to see what you come up with :)

Tracing: Evolved

A new generation of tracing has arrived. No longer do we need bright lights, thick lines and translucent paper. Now all you have to do is:

• Find the picture you want to trace.
• Open it in an image editor or drawing program that uses layers (like GIMP or what I use to draw, MyPaint).
• Create a new layer and make sure it is on top of the picture.
• Pull out your digital pen and trace away!
• When done, delete the layer that contains the original photo.
• Click 'Save As' (so you don't over-write the original photo if it's saved on your computer) and save your tracing under a new name.
• You've now created your own line drawing!

I added a flowing cape and removed the background from the original in an attempt to make myself more heroic. I placed a line wherever there was a major colour or shade change.
I could now print this out, photocopy it and have the best colouring page of all time. Why spend hours scouring the google-net for suitable clip art? We can make our own!

DISCLAIMER: Make sure to use creative commons or public domain images to stay within the law. 

I used my own picture for this tracing example, so I don't need to credit myself.

And the winner is...

All the votes have been tallied and the keyboard is victorious! The spider web was the clear loser, with no votes, but perhaps it'll make a comeback as a Hallowe'en themed badge...

Here's the code to add it to your blog:

<a href="https://www.google.com/reader/bundle/user%2F07086533109188873610%2Fbundle%2FInternet%20for%20Ed%202013"><img src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8366/8483228233_0fde4f62c9_o.png" alt="#I4Ed" width="205" height="79" border="0"></a><br />

<a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/deed.en_GB"><img alt="Creative Commons Licence" style="border-width:0" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-sa/3.0/80x15.png" /></a>

<font size="-2">thanks to <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/o_o/5743370/">o_o</a></font>

And here's how to add it to your blog. (If you use blogger, sorry Wordpress-ers.)