SLMAM Oct07: Graphic Inquiry: Skills and Strategies, Part II
Image: Plasq.com
On pages 38 – 42 of the October issue of School Library Media Activities Monthly, authors Daniel Callison and Annette Lamb discuss various strategies for helping students develop strengths in reading, comprehending, analyzing, and interpreting graphics. From my own drama experience using tableau (in which students pose as objects and people in works of art), I know that a close examination of a photo or drawing can reap many intriguing questions and realizations among students.
The article also covers how we can bring free or inexpensive software tools to help students develop graphics to demonstrate a concept or understanding. Tools they reference include PowerPoint, Inspiration, or the line tools Thinkature and Gliffy.
But my favorite tool in this article is Comic Life, referred to on the last page. Comic Life lets users quickly create graphic novels and comic books by dragging and dropping photos from their personal collection into one of a series of comic book templates. Add an exciting title, some word bubbles, and the project is done! I tried a few projects at home before trying it out: a biography of Abraham Lincoln and a self-portrait.
I first encountered Comic Life in one of Annette’s sessions at the Michigan Association for Media in Education’s Midwinter meeting, and then discovered it again when a district colleague raved about it. But I couldn’t use it, as it was only for newer Macs, and our district was transitioning to PCs.
This summer, though, I discovered that Comic Life is in beta-testing for Windows! Yahoo! We’ve been trying the beta versions at school, and kids are having a blast! As I mentioned before, our ratio of boys to girls is particularly high, and we were exploring different writing modalities that would appeal more to boys (but still be appealing to girls).
Our fifth graders have made comics about life at school and will soon use Comic Life to reflect on what they learned while away at fifth grade camp. One of our other teachers has played with the idea of taking photos weekly and using Comic Life as an alternative newsletter to document the learnings that week.
In her workshop for MAME, Annette demonstrated how she created a comic book for biography, one to share information about trees, and one to talk about a historic village. You can see her examples here.
You can get a free beta-test version of Comic Life for Windows here, and it will stay free until November 1. After that, I anticipate that it will cost around $30, as that’s about what the Mac version costs. File this one under “Big bang for the buck” or, as I told my students, “A project so cool you probably didn’t even think we teachers were hip enough to know about it.”