Wednesday, May 6, 2009

A Comic Adventure


I have been spending some time playng around with comic Life as a vehicle for the sixth grade to review or highlight one particular story of The Children's Homer. It has been rather interesting to adjust our PC thinking to a tool that was originally created for a Mac, but we are making some progress. This particular group of kids have been good sports about trying out new things, and this experience is certainly challenging. We are learning a lot through our mistakes and finding that we wish Comic Life had some features that it currently does not. The students are thinking of clever images they would like to morph to create a particular scene, but it seems a bit complicated for us right now.
So far, I am pleased with the amount of information we have managed to integrate into this study:
1. Obviously, the use of Comic Life software, but also the ability to envision a scene and think visually.
2. How to effectively search for a photo by trying a variety of descriptions.We saw the same pictures of Brad Pitt every time someone searched for Achilles, but we got a much larger variety when we search "Ancient Greek warriors."
3.Focusing on the main idea - the comic form is mostly visual and cannot be bogged down by too much text. Choosing pictures that best convey your meaning and use of minimal, but effective, verbiage is a challenge to some.
4.Learning about copyright . We created a 'photo-ography' to give credit to the creators of the images selected. We adapted the MLA format for this introductory exercise, knowing we can build on the MLA format for images later.
5. As part of our image search, the students became familiar with the sites of Flickr as well as the features of Google books.
6. Students who chose to create their own images needed to learn to operate the scanner as well as edit and save their photos. Students who wanted to use png. images also needed to use Microsoft Photo Draw to learn how to save as a .JPEG
7. Students learned the importance of extension for images as well as the importance of determining the credibility of websites using skills they had developed earlier in the year.
8. We were also able to talk about bibliographies as a whole and what plagiarism is. When we give a research project, the students need to understand we don't expect them to know all about it already. We expect them to analyze, review, and synthesize material so that it makes sense to them. They just need to state their sources.
9. Punctuation review was also a bonus as we spoke about the different types of punctuation with long and short works.
10. The students learned the value of creating a plan - figuring out your story, obtaining your images while concurrently saving bibliographic information about them, choosing the appropriate template to accommodate their photos by examining whether the layout is portrait or landscape, as well as adding the "accessories" of color and font style at the end, rather than focusing on them at the beginning.
All in all, I am happy for the experience and what we have learned from it. Due to the amount of ink used in creating the 3-4 page comics, we realize that a teacher needs to sign off on the quality of the work before printing begins. We also gave a minimum and maximum range of frames to keep the project manageable. We talked about different styles for different formats. Since Comic Life is a visual tool, you need to make it "eye-friendly' and visually interesting so that the reader is engaged by the variety of visuals and text without being overwhelmed.
I look forward to using it again in the future and hope it will create some enthusiasm among our faculty.

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