The Hero Factory - Create a Superhero avatar

Kids love to create avatars and what could be better than turning yourself into a 'Superhero'!
The Hero Factory has a range of looks and accessories to create your Superhero.


These can then be downloaded and used as avatars. You will need to crop them before they can use them for that purpose.

A name is generated once you have finished your creation. Mine is 'Whipped Nine Tails'

I could see these characters influencing writing. Students can create them and build their own individual Superhero bios. Students could then work collaboratively together to create their own Superhero world!







R rating: None

Make Beliefs Comix

Create comics with characters, panel prompts and talk balloons MakebeliefsComix. Make 2, 3 or 4 page comics. You can't save or download the comics but you can Email or print (or take a screen capture and paste into Word or PowerPoint).

If you are taking a screen capture for showing in a PowerPoint then make sure that you only do a 2 page comic at a time, that way you will get a better image when you make it bigger on the screen.

Children from Hunua School went on class trip to the local Police Station. They presented the experience they had by creating comics in Make Beliefs Comix and then inserted the finished comics into PowerPoint.

Be Funky - Catoonise your photos

Be Funky is a photo editing application that will cartoonise your photos in colour or as line drawings.



These can then be saved to your computer.

Use these images to create a cartoon in ComicLife or insert them into Autoshapes in Word or PowerPoint.

There is also a wonderful morphing tool where you can stretch parts of the photo. These boys look like elves now!

Eventually you will be able to cartoonise video clips as well as this is a feature they are working on. See a demo here.

Kerpoof - Motivate children's writing

Kerpoof is a great piece of software that you can use to motivate










children's writing. It is free, colourful and interactive.
Make a Picture - choose a background and make a picture using the graphics provided, use the text button to add text to the page. Print the page out as full A4 or as a card. You can also choose to print it out in full colour or as a colouring book page.

Make a Movie option allows you to create a movie with moving objects. There are 7 different story lines to pick from, several scene pages and a limited amount of graphics for each page. Choose from the animation list to animate the objects. Text can be added to the scene as well. It can be saved to an account at Kerpoof or printed.

Make a drawing has drawing tools where you can create a picture and print it out.

Make a card has 8 preset cards including Birthday, Thank you etc. with a limited set of graphics to add.

The Make a Story is my favourite option with 19 different scenes, some graphics, text boxes and text speech bubbles. You can also add more scenes to the story.

This would be a great site for those children who don't have anything to write about as it provides the scenes and graphics, but they get to add the words. They can manipulate the graphics and can add their own drawings to it by using the pen tool. It prints out beautifully as well.

Toondoo and Creating Comics

Since posting on this blog about Kerpoof, I have been directed to another comic making interactive online site. This one is called ToonDoo. You can make 1-3 page comics using numerous backgrounds and graphics. You can change the body position of the figures and facial expressions. There are lots of props and drawing tools to create your own backgrounds. You can save the comics and publish for everyone to see or you can publish privately. If you publish for anybody to see then anybody can comment. That was the only problem with this programme were the comments as they could be inappropriate for children. Some of the cartoons made by other people were a little dodgy as well.
The actual editing page is fine but the main home page changes all the time so you are never sure what is going to pop up. But it is still a worthwhile site to use with careful monitoring. Particularly for younger children I would set up the editing page for them, then there is no need for them to see the home page.
There is no download feature which is a shame as it would be great to download the comic and print it whole screen. But there are always ways around this, you can print out the page when it is in View mode, cut out the comic and glue on to other paper. Or you can take a screen capture (Windows: press the Print Screen button on your keyboard, open Paint, Press Ctrl V and then use the square selector tool to crop the area you need. Copy paste that piece into the Wordprocessor of your choice) Mac Users press Shift, Ctrl, Option and 4, click and drag around the comic, paste into your wordprocessor page.
Again this is another great interactive writing motivating tool.