The Teacher Toolbox

Today I was asked about the process I use when drawing my Stressbusters cartoons. So here is the process that I’ve developed over the last couple of months to give the strip a unique feel.

Check Out All the Stressbusters - to get an idea

1. My drawing tool of choice is my Wacom Tablet. I use it to draw all the lines as ‘Drawing with a mouse is like picking your nose with your elbow’

1a. I then use Inkscape’s calligraphy tool (freeware) set on a line thinkness of 1 and 2 to draw the characters. I find this creates line that gives the pics a nice feel.

2. I save each character, plant and background as an .eps file

3. I import each .eps file into Photoshop and colour it on a separate layer. I’ve been messing with the magic wand tool to select areas and then fill them with a gradient rather than straight colour.

4. I position all the characters and resize it all to about 400 pixels and save it as a high quality jpeg

5. Next I import the pic into Comic Life Deluxe Comic Life Deluxe $30 and add the text and speech bubbles. NB it is also available for the PC

From now on I’m still experimenting… I’m stuggling with file size verses clarity. When I export or save in Comic Life the pics turn out very blurry. So at the moment I do a screen dump of the Comic Life screen and optimise it for the web in Photoshop.

Stressbusters really are work in progress.

cheers

Adrian

PS Feel free to print them out and pin them on your notice boards.

Hey All,

If you only go to one conference this year in Australia it has to be Expanding Learning Horizons (ELH) in Lorne Victoria Australia. Watch out for the flyers as they hit your school.

This conference has great cutting edge speakers, an excellent variety of workshops to suit your interests, great food, it’s close to the beach, it has excellent after parties and best of all… it is small enough that you get one on one time over breakfast, lunch or dinner with the presenters.

Last year I managed to stalk/network with Will Richardson

and the year before that I mangaged to get a couple of straight answers out of Gary Stager hehehehe. Funny that

The one hassle I find with conferences like this is that I have to present at the same time as some of my Yodas.

So over the next few days I really must put together my proposals for this year’s conference and see if I’ll be accepted 3 years in a row.

cheers

Adrian

I ripped into http://www.alexa.com/ this morning to see how my webiste was going before my American traffic drops off for their Summer Break.

Imagine my surprise to find that adrianbruce.com has jumped about 54 000 places to be the 330 109th most popular site on the Internet.

I’m getting the feeling my site is on the right track putting together what a friend of mine described as, ‘A one stop shop for just in time teaching’ - thnx MizMinh

Oh well, time to get back to reality and make a few new resources.

cheers

Adrian
with 21 000 subscribers & counting

Over the last couple of years I’ve had the opportunity to work with some very clever students. Last year one of them knocked me up this T-shirt based on my site’s Alexa ranking. Tah!

Today when I was hunting for some files I came across it. I ripped into alexa.com to see if the rank had changed and was rather surprised to find that my site had popped up a little in the rankings. My 3 month average is the 417 219th most popular website on the Internet. Sort of makes you all warm and fuzzy inside So I jumped into Photoshop and changed the numbers to what they are today.

On digging around in the stats on the site I found that in certain countries around the world my site’s ranking is much higher. e.g .

Fiji = 2 696 th most popular, Barain = 16 196th, Australia = 44 000th, Quatar = 55 171 and that 5% of my traffic comes from The United Arab Emirates.

It was also nice to see just how many countries are downloading my resources and using them to educate. http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/adrianbruce.com

All that said, I aim to keep the site growing. So feel free to get your friends to subscribe to my newsletter and pass my site around those who need the resources. I have heaps more ideas that I want to get online over the coming months esp poetry, 5 minute Science ideas, a heap more Math games, ideas on reducing ‘teacher stress’ and esp the reading games that people have converted to other languages for me to add to the site.

cheers

Adrian