EDTech Article "How To Use Comic Life in the Classroom by Charle Thacker

"How to Use Comic Life in the Classroom"
Charles Thacker
Thursday, March 8, 2007

MacInstruct.com,TechEd - Technology in Education



There's a long history of comics in the classroom, and the list of references at the end of this article is a great starting point for learning about this concept. 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 address many 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
…and on and on



What is Comic Life?
Comic Life is an award winning application for creating not just comics (obviously), 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.