teflgeek

Spotted on Carla Arena’s Collablogatorium – Superlame! is a tool that lets you upload photos (currently only from your PC – no URL grabs) and add speech bubbles, thought bubbles and suchlike.  With some creative use of the speech bubble boxes, you can also create captions.

SuperLame! Comic Word Balloons, Speech Bubbles, and Thought Balloons, etc..

As an example, I’ve taken a simple teflgeek cartoon and turned it into a masterpiece of wit and humour – (see below).

Superlame doesn’t keep the pics you create on their servers for longer than 24 hours or so, so you will need to take advantage of their “save” or “email” facilities – but it is easy enough to save the pics.

The obvious use that suggests itself is that of the photostory.  Previously I’ve done photostory work with learners where they’ve scripted something, acted it our with a camera, printed the pictures, stuck them on a large bit of paper, written out the speech bubbles and captions by hand, cut them out, stuck them on bit of paper and then presented the end result.

The change with superlame is not a big one, but would allow for more textual work, smoother editing (and correction by the teacher) and a more highly polished “final product” – the superlame versions of the pics could either be printed out, cut and glued onto a larger presentation poster, or could be worked into an A4 size “comic book” for easy printing and distribution amongst class members.

As the end of the academic year approaches and we all start looking for something project based to fill those last few weeks (or for those of us heading onto to summer schools around the world) – this is a really handy and timely idea!