On one of my courses recently a delegate told me that she was going to be running a Bram Stoker month in November. He was born on November 8th 1847, so this will be the 170th anniversary of his birth. I thought that was a splendid idea, and over the weekend I put together a bunch of resources that might be helpful to anyone else doing something similar. You're welcome to use any, all or none of them, or to take the ideas and create entirely different things.
A Symbaloo page. If you visit https://www.symbaloo.com/mix/bramstoker you'll see a mix of a dozen or more links to Bram Stoker and Dracula websites. If you use Symbaloo (it's free!) you can take a copy of the mix and use it yourself, adding in your own links as appropriate until you've got a really nice collection of places that you can point your users towards.
A Google map. I put together a map of places around the world that are appropriate either for Bram Stoker's life, or which relate to episodes in Dracula. Again, you are free to take a copy of it and you can edit it for yourself. I just did a bare bones approach, so there are plenty of opportunities to add in more links, photographs, more content and so on. It's available at https://drive.google.com/open?id=15_EAIb_CzGMbWAOXEDtnV2Ss_A4&usp=sharing
Trading cards. I used the excellent Big Huge Labs site to create a set of trading cards. They are designed to be used as Top Trumps. It's a two player game, one playing Van Helsing, and the other Dracula. Each player chooses a card of their choice and choose the criteria you'll use. Match your number to that chosen on both cards, and the winner takes the losers card. Alternatively, they can 'save' one of their other characters that's already been captured. The winner is the one who captures all of their opponents cards. There's a complete set in my Flickr album, but here's a couple of examples.
You could print a whole series of them off - a set will easily fit on a page of A4, laminate and give them out.
Dracula Quote. I used Quozio to produce a nice little poster of one of Dracula's more interesting quotes - this is also available in the Flickr collection as well.
There's also a magazine cover that I created again using the BigHugeLabs site. You could put in your own photograph - perhaps of your own library? Given that you'll just have had Halloween you might be able to get some 'spooky' shots you could use.
There's also plenty of opportunities for funny images as well, so I used a Keep Calm and Carry on template to create a different type of poster:
You could use that, or come up with your own slogan - perhaps take a photograph of a member of staff in Dracula type outfit and use that as your lead image?
I produced a word cloud using Tagxedo, which is an excellent little tool. I just used the Wikipedia page for Bram Stoker - I was in a bit of a rush so didn't edit out as many of the useless words as I could have done, so you might want to redo it yourself, and change the colours - the shape was from Tagxedo, but you could always put your own in.
Finally I created a little movie, using the Google photos movie creation app. I'm sure that you could do better than my attempt however!
All of the images above are, as I say, available in my Flickr Album. Feel free to use it, or create your own from the ideas that I've put together.
Comments