83 Comic Life and literacy links

The lovely people at Plasq.com have now made this application cross platform. Comic Life is one of my favourites for it's durability and it's flexibility to support learning, especially literacy. I have worked with reluctant writers who were only too keen to create cartoon captions. (The wee sweethearts told me that wasn't really writing.) It takes quite a lot of thinking to construct a caption that is going to convey your meaning in less than about 10 words with out loosing the key information or message. Using language, symbols and text, with photos and the drawings support your caption and help tell the story. Personally, I believe one of the biggest advantages in using Comic Life is that students have to reprocess information in order to change it from a text platform to a visual platform. This requires considerable thought and also removes the ‘cut and paste’ option especially form the www for presenting work. Obviously, for visual learners, graphical representations of the work may be more effective method of learning than using straight text. I mentioned Comic life was flexible. You don't have to use photos, students can use their drawings, as shown by the bears. Completed comics can be inserted into other programme, inserted into movies, blogs wikis etc or just run as a stand alone web page or QuickTime. How's that for flexibility!

Maths

How to - instructions

Goal setting

Science

learning a language

letter sound recognition

Add Digital story telling

IPC Adventurers and explorers

I wrote way back then about the flexibility of Comic Life. Last week I had a WOW moment when a colleague shared with me some new learning.
Rather than using a template for Comiclife, stay with the blank page. Pull over a series of photos and arrange them like a montage. Use angles, over lapping etc. Save this as an image (jpg) onto your desk top. However this does make a huge file. Compress compress compress. Now upload the image to become your screen saver. Really powerful and so so much easier than using Photoshop. Now the implications for learning.......I've used images like this in Photoshop to represent a word, eg compassion, making those links and connections in literacy.
In the meantime I'm sharing my son's recent graduation as the montage.