Happy Tuesday!
Today is all about comics. There are so many choices out there for creating comics with children, but I've narrowed it down to two. One is for our younger students and the other is for the older.
The first is Arthur's Comic Creator This site is pretty awesome. You can start with a clean slate and slowly add in your characters, or you can pull the lever and it will put in a 'story starter' for you. Once the story starter is in place, you can change it however you like. You do this by clicking on, removing and adding different characters, backgrounds, etc.
The second site is called: Make Beliefs Comix.com
The first thing I noticed when I began working with this site is the possible complexity. You can choose a whole range of characters, settings and even emotions. Like the Arthur site, each element can be scaled up and down, rotated and flipped to your liking. Make Beliefs Comix.com even has the ability to have you write your comic in a multitude of foreign languages. I could see this as a possible Spanish activity.
The only downside I've seen to Make Beliefs Comix.com is that it limits you to three panels. However, my very curious teenager didn't let that stop her. She used the site to complete an English project by making four three panel comic strips to accomplish her goal. Once you've created your strip, we used the always handy PDF (Save to PDF function) when it was time to print. From there, we were able to put all of the strips on one Pages document and print them off.
So, how do you think you might be able to use this with your students? As always, we would love to have your thoughts on our T4 website so that we all can learn from one another and our valuable insights.
Please note: I'm attaching two files to this Tech Tip as well. These two files come from The New York Times Education Wing and are great ways to use a photo (from the Times or not) to pull out details of a story. I thought they fit the theme of comix quite well.
Here are the links to those files: What's Unsaid and Storyboard
Thanks,
Todd
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