Creating comics for professional and instructional use is a fun pathway to learning. I used makebeliefscomix.com to create a mini lesson about cell phone use in the classroom. Before you begin, DO NOT USE BACK BUTTON or you will lose all of your work. I learned this the hard way, but like in most projects, editing improves your final product. This site has easy to use pop-up balloons for thoughts and speaking, as well as tools for scaling the size of the images.
I like this site because it’s free, easy-to-use and has a selection of cute characters that you can change in a few different ways to show emotion. It takes a few minutes to learn, but I think even very young students could benefit from playing with makebeliefscomix.com.
For example, young readers and writers could be given a list of vocabulary words and they could write impromptu comics or write a brief script and than create their comic strip.
http://www.makebeliefscomix.com/Comix/?comix_id=23737783C166412
The nice thing about www.makebeliefcomix.com is that it offers writer’s prompts, teaching resources and other educational tools.
The following link offers 21 ways to use www.makebeliefcomix.com in the classroom.
http://www.makebeliefscomix.com/How-to-Play/Educators/
Toondoospaces.com
Just launched September 16, 2009, check out the blog at http://toondoospaces.webblogs.zoho.com/
I checked out http://www.toondoospaces.com. This has both free and paid components. You can create your own characters or use pre-drawn characters. It seems a bit complex, but once you play with it you could create very interactive and ornate cartoons for many use. See the demo videos, they are very comprehensive.
ToonDooSpaces should be a fun way to learn for all ages. It’s unique and should encourage engagement for anyone interested in using. It can be used to learn new concepts, skills and even languages. It can also be used for students to collaborate on projects and is a productive tools for both teachers and students. It is a good addition to social networking for education.
http://www.toondoospaces.com/demo/
This link takes you to a nice slice presentation about Toondoospace.com
http://www.slideshare.net/shend5/tap-into-the-world-of-comics?src=embed
I went to stripgenerator and made a similar comic strip about cell phones and Ms. Chuckles at the following link.
http://tapflorida.stripgenerator.com/post/tapflorida/2009/11/15/ms-chuckles/
Overall, comic strips can be a useful education tool. I think they would also be useful for online classes. For example, if you want to make some fun instructions for a mass media course, why not use a cartoon format to tell your students where to find information.
GLOG
I found glogster. It is an interesting site to make posters with. They are called glogs. Not sure what the g stands for, but with a little time, anyone could create a nice poster. This could be used for making posters in schools for recycling, environmental issues, etc. My sample is: http://tapflorida.glogster.com/glog/
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Thanks for the review of glog. I had never heard of it. I perused the site and found some great stuff. The glogs include hyperlinks to other sites, so it's a great jumping off site. I can see students loving to create digital collages. In some ways, isn't an aggregator, like google reader, just a collage of your different interests anyway? Glog is like a more graphical bubbl.us.
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