Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Making a Cartoon Strip with Stripgenerator


Stripgenerator.com is a site that makes it easy even for people who can't draw to make cartoon strips. You can choose between various beings or animals, add objects, and then add balloons with text in your favorite language.

Creating a cartoon strip would be a fun class activity for kids, and the best cartoons could be published in a school paper or newsletter.

Monday, March 2, 2009

Using PowerPoint to Make a Language Lesson

Last week I reviewed Mango Languages and suggested that the basic format of their lesson could be recreated in PowerPoint and exported to Flash using free software like authorPOINT Lite. I sheepishly admitted that I had never used PowerPoint before, but I promised to give it a try. So here's a lesson in Koasati, designed to teach a short conversation involving greetings. Press the big play button, and then press the >> key to advance each slide.

This lesson would have been better with a bilingual person as the narrator. I used clip art for the image of "Jae", but using an image of someone in the community would have been more fun. I'd like to test it, too: This dialogue might be too much for someone to learn at once. Still, it does seem possible to make lessons like this using inexpensive materials.