Comics-ing it up

I had a lot of fun making this comic. I downloaded comic life, and was really surprised at 1) How complicated the things you make can be and 2) how easy it is to use. Drag and drop, intuition on how to move things around, etc. I didn't put in too many of the extra things, but I poked around and looked at the tools and stuff, and I was blown away by how much the program can do, and anyone can pick it right up! It was really easy and I think students would pick up on it really quickly and have a lot of fun doing it. Adapting "normal" texts into comic format would be a great way to get kids visualizing and creating, but also get them to pick out important points (you would have to cut a lot of stuff from the text), think about how emotions come through, and challenge them to think in a way they probably haven't before.

One of the things I really liked was realizing that I had to figure out how to get the pictures and text boxes to work together. I would put in a picture, then realize I had no place for text, so putting it off center actually helped, which is counter-intuitive when arranging pictures. The other thing I had to think about, which I already mentioned, is deciding what to put in and what to leave out. That's a hard decision, but I think students would really benefit from that decision-making process.

The comic I created is about my son, Joshua. Really, I chose it because I had a huge library of pictures to work from and I had already done our Honeymoon for Voicethread. Apparently Blogger does not accept PDF files, and I can't get it to convert to any other type of file, so I had to upload it to my softball team's website. Here's the link:

www.si-softball.org/ComicJoshuaSmall.pdf