Michael Senise

ComicLife is a great tool for use with students to get the students to use higher order thinking skills and engage them in the learning process. Over the course of using ComicLife with students, I have found how helpful it is to do a few things prior to having the students produce their comic to really make sure that the students are producing a high quality product.  I have outlined the steps that we use when have students produce a comic below:

Step 1:  ORGANIZE INFORMATION – Having the students take the information they will place in the comic and organize it into a map.  Typically we have students use Inspiration software or CMAP tools  to do this.  This step really focuses the students in thinking about their topic and begins to help them synthesize the information that will ultimately end up in the comic.  It also allows them through this organizational process to get the information ready to be storyboarded in step 2.

Step 2:  STORYBOARD – Having the students create a storyboard of the comic with a template such as the one below.  A storyboard that we have used can be found at http://www.ivieawards.org/storyboard1.pdf.  In the storyboard, the students draw the pictures that they want to see in each frame of the comic and write in the dialogue that they will want as well that goes with each frame.  In this step of the process, I will have students really make the comic exciting.  I will typically have students personify their information in some way so they are not just giving the facts back to me through their comic.  For example, when having the students create a comic that covers mitosis in science class, we may have the student personify a narrator or sports announcer in the comic so that they can word the language in each section of the comic accordingly.  This really helps students to use their creativity to synthesize and summarize their information in such a way as it best fits with the comic.  It also requires students to revisit the information time and again to edit and revise according to the persona that I have asked them to use.  Plus, it is not uncommon for students to edit many times to get it just right as there is a limited space for writing in each frame of the comic.

Step 3:  GATHER PICTURES – Having students gather the pictures they will need for the comic on the Internet, by scanning drawings, or taking photos with digital camera.  These pictures will match the sketches that they drew in step 2.  The reason we like to have the students do this step after the storyboard step is that in the storyboarding process, the students have settled on what their images will look like and streamlines the process.

Step 4:  PRODUCE THE COMIC – ComicLife is very easy for students to learn and takes only a few minutes of instruction for them to learn the ins and outs of how to use the program.  Typically, we may spend only a total of 5-10 minutes maximum showing students how to use the program as it is very drag and drop oriented.  ComicLife also has great help built in on the help menu and covers all topics quite well.  On the Mac, you can also print the manual as well.

Oftentimes while students are producing the comic, they find that what they wrote in their storyboard did not quite work when they make their comic.  This ends up being a good thing in the long run because this helps the students to have to revisit their information again and how they conveyed it in the storyboard and edit accordingly, thus revisiting the content again.

Step 5: PUBLISHING – If students are required to publish their information to a wider audience, it really makes them step up their game.  What we have found is that students will peer review and self edit quite a bit more often than if we are just asking the student to produce the work for the teacher.  They are much more conscious of quality when they are publishing to peers and a wider audience.  The comic came be exported in various formats including images, PDF (on Mac), web pages, and movies.  

Links:

Download ComicLife

How to Use Comic Life in the Classroom (courtesy of Charles Thacker, TechEd)

Storyboard

Workshop Description

What is Comic Life?

Comic Life is an award winning application for creating not just comics, but also annotated images,

dynamic photo albums, greeting cards, scrap books, story books, and instruction guides and brochures.

In the classroom, it is an excellent tool for creating reports of almost any kind. Comic Life allows you to

create page layouts with boxes for images and text. Styles can be applied to create just about any type

of ‘feel’ for your document. Captions can be created with tails in order to have thought balloons, speech

boxes or just additional annotations. Filters are available to turn your digital images into a variety of hand

drawn looking graphics to enhance the comic appearance of your work.

In the classroom, there are many curricular connections including: vocabulary, storytelling, storyboarding and much more! This workshop will provide examples of how Comic Life is used to engage students, as well as lesson plans including planning sheets, graphic organizers, rubrics and more. Of course, there will be plenty of hands on time for you to create your own comics and learn the software!

Comic Life is compatible with both Windows and Mac platforms.

How to Use Comic Life in the Classroom

(courtesy of Charles, Thacker, TechEd- http://www.macinstruct.com/node/69)

There’s a long history of comics in the classroom. While there’s still resistance to this medium being used in education – whether by staff or students – there is also a growing movement to use every valuable tool available.

Comics have some great uses in the classroom and in a variety of curricula. From pre-readers to high school students, from English to ESL to Science and Math, comics can help students analyze, synthesize and absorb content that may be more difficult when presented in only one way.

Why Comics in the Classroom?

For the pre-reader, a comic can be purely graphical in nature and help provide practice with sequencing as well as concrete to abstract transitions using illustrations instead of written words. The written component of a comic can be introduced when the early readers are ready to connect words with images. Comics can help early readers or readers with language acquisition problems by providing visual clues to the context of the narrative.

For more advanced readers, comics can contain all the complexity of ‘normal’ written material which the student must decode and comprehend, such as puns, alliteration, metaphors, symbolism, point of view, context, inference, and narrative structures. A comic can also be a stepping-stone to more complex and traditional written work. A single pane in a comic can represent paragraphs worth of written material in a manner that is enjoyable and effective for the early or challenged reader.

Comics also have the ability to meet the needs of students in a variety of learning styles. Tom Hart illustrates how comics addressmany of Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences in this short article. I strongly recommend that you read through the articles in the reference section below as many others have covered the concept of comics in education in far more detail than I do here.

Using Comic Life to Facilitate Student Participation

With the time educators have for research and professional reading becoming increasingly scarce, I know that a quick ‘What can I do with this tomorrow in class?’ concept must be presented. For this, I will select an example (the book report) that is simple and quick to implement, although there are far more effective uses of comics in the classroom.

We have staff using Comic Life to facilitate student participation in assignments that traditionally would have been written assignments with little to no imagery included. The book report is a classic example of how Comic Life can breath new life into an old assignment.

Often dreaded by students (including myself), the book report is a staple of the classroom for several reasons. First, it provides a way to evaluate whether or not a student has read the assigned material. It also allows a student to show how they synthesize and analyze information contained in written material. Depending on the course requiring the report, this may include character and plot analysis, thematic content, purpose, story development, historical reference, and personal evaluation or judgment.

The book reports we often see in classes are, well, boring. Comic Life can help students create reports that are interesting to themselves and the class – reports that are fun to create and share. The paneled interface of a comic lends itself to breaking larger concepts into smaller, easily digested ideas that can be strung together in a coherent and entertaining way. Creating the imagery used in the comic can draw a student into the story or character in a way that a written report simply can’t.

Use Comic Life to help break down complex ideas and to create entertaining content for material that can sometimes be dull. Here are some assignment ideas that lend themselves to the use of Comic Life:

* Timelines (history, events, sequences)

* Historical figures (history of, life of)

* Instructions (step by step, details, illustrations, easy to follow)

* Dialogue punctuation

* Character analysis

* Plot analysis

* Storytelling

* Pre-Writing Tool

* Post-Reading Tool

* Teaching Onomatopoeias