Learning Digitally

Miguel Guhlin over at his Thinkfinity Texas blog recently shared some great lessons at the ReadWriteThink site to guide teachers in using the graphic novel genre to help students develop their writing and literacy skills. If you have been looking for a way to bring comics and graphic novels into your ELA instruction ReadWriteThink is a great place to start. In all you can find more than 20 lesson plans, spanning grades 3-12, that incorporate their online Comic Creator into the writing process.

Comic Creator is a great site to use with younger students. The graphics are kid friendly, printer friendly, and no complicated menus to figure out. However, Comic Creator may leave older students wanting more control, color, and the ability to publish, share and collaborate with others. So, I embarked on a mission to find and compare the features of other online comic strip generators and how they could support learning in subjects other than ELA. Here are a few of the sites and ideas I came up with.

• Make Beliefs Comix - A safe environment for young students to practice their design and writing skills. Each frame has a writing prompt to help guide through the story building. The final products can be emailed and/or printed.
• ToonDoo - Taking cartoon creating to the next level, students using ToonDoo can create multiple frame stories, then tag, save, and publish in ToonDoo to share with friends or inside their own blog. (ToonDoo cartoon can also be saved for private viewing as well.)
  Making ToonDoo one of the best sites for creating comics (IMHO) is that build right into the site is TraitR, DoodleR, and ImagineR where the users can create their own characters, draw their own backgrounds, and import images from the web or saved on their computers.
  Users do need to register to use the site, and there may be some content that inappropriate for young viewers. When setting up accounts, students can turn on “Safe Search” feature and comics can be flagged and reported as inappropriate.
• Instructables - Using your own photos, students can create and post their own “how-to” with text to share online or print as PDFs.
• Witty Comics – Incorporating backgrounds from around the world and realistic adult characters, students might choose to use this comic generator to create social satire, comment on political oe other news events, do create a travelogue. Downside to the site is limited character and background, lack of customizable content, and all comic are composed of three frames.
• Bitstrip - For customizability, I give this site high marks. Select a character, open the controls, and the facial features and the body position of the character can be adapted to add visual impact to the dialogs. Background and the objects within them can moved, colored and resized. Additional objects can be added to the scenes to support the story. Saved strips can be printed, published and shared, or kept private. Like ToonDoo you have to register to use the site and some content may be found that is unsuitable for younger students. Young viewers can set up their profile to block mature or offensive content (unfortunately I could not find a way to block both).
  Strips that published can be commented and remixed by viewers with an email sent to the creator. For safety, teachers may choose to instruct students to set their profiles to block receiving email or only to publish their strips to be viewed by friends.

Once you choose which of the comic generators best match your classroom needs, how will you use them to support your student’s learning? Here are just a few ideas.

• Retelling history – Can your students recreate characters from history to retell important events? Illustrate piviotal events that define a decade or lead up to a critical moment in history.
• Government – The writing and passing of a bill into law. Explore the impact of the political cartoon on public opinion; how would you promote a cause or bring attention to the policies or position of a your elected officials? What do the political posters, cartoons, and graphic images teach us about a time or event in history?
• Science – Explain the Scientific Process, outline the steps of an experiment or discovery, illustrate the life cycle of a plant or animal or the uses of chemical elements.
• Math – What a great way to make word problems fun! Explain the steps of solving an equation, put a “face” on geometric shapes, or show math at work in the world.
• Art – Here is a great opportunity to explore the graphic design elements that make the graphic novel both a compelling literary format and great art form. Team with your art teachers to look at the history of the graphic novel, the development of the art form over time, and the mechanics of drawing comics.
• Foreign language – Create an illustrated dictionary. Students could collaborate, adding to a class book over the span of the school year. Practice new vocabulary, conversation, and illustrate idioms.

Do you have other ideas to share? Have you incorporated comics or graphic novels into your students learning? If you haven’t I hope this posting might spark an idea of how creating comics can inspire your student’s creativity and prose.