Exactly what the title says, I took my popular Comic Template for MIcrosoft Publisher and converted it into an Open Office Draw file over the weekend. I decided that with only 3 short weeks between Thanksgiving and the Christmas break, I should give the 3rd graders something fun to do.
Rather than work on rather dry word prcoessing skills by typing up a story and then adding clipart in just the right places followed by some simple font editing, I decided to give them the comic template to practice. By the end of week 3 they’ll have had plenty of practice adding clipart, manipulating text, changing fonts, and hopefuly some spell checking!
Not sure on my verdict for how well the conversion to Open Office Draw went. The speech bubbles and boxes all came over with a simple copy and paste, but I had to group all of the boxes together and then lock their position in the properties box (thought I’d stay two steps ahead of the kids). Unfortunately, Open Office still has a ways to go; despite grouping the boxes and locking their positions down, I was still able to double click on a single box, and then move it around the page. Not very helpful when the kids are trying to put images and words inside of the boxes and they keep sliding around. Putting text into the speech bubbles was also a half-victory. Typing too much text does not automatically stretch the speech bubble out, and you have to put in artifical breaks because the text doesn’t auto-wrap inside of the bubbles 🙁
So if anyone out there is a whiz with Open Office and knows how to fix those mistakes, feel free to offer a suggestion or two. Otherwise, enjoy the template below!
Comic Template for Open Office Draw
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Ben,
Regarding the Text in bubbles, you can right mouse click on bubble and choose “Text”. You will have several fun options: “Effect” “Word wrap text in shape” “Resize shape to fix text”.
Regarding the blocks moving around you can use different layers or combine several things together as a bitmap. Just hold the shift and control select the pieces then choose Modify>convert>bitmap. This would be helpful to the students so once they create the perfect super character it will look the same in the different blocks.
Very cool, Ben. The possibilities of using this with open office has awesome potential. I wish I was the whiz with open office you are looking for but I am afraid I am not. I will be checking this out for my computer applications class, thanks!