Overall, creating a comic was really fun and easy. ComicLife is super easy to use. It was really simple to drag in the images and add the text. The characters are based on friends that were camping with me at the time, but I had to think about what they might say or think in brief snippets to make the story come to life in this comic. Because so much of the story is told through the pictures, it was also important to for me to choose appropriate photographs to convey the story. This is one thing that differs from most traditional print texts for adolescents and adults.
Digital comics would be great to incorporate into a multigenre writing unit, or even as a prewriting activity for narratives. My students often struggled to zoom in on characters, slow down the storyline, and--the classic--show versus tell what is happening. It would be so great to teach these skills using digital comics. If I were writing a narrative about camping, I could use this comic to prepare me to write a scene about making breakfast. When I was teaching, we actually did use a comic to demonstrate "zooming in" in writing, but it would have been even more engaging to have students create a "zoom" and not just look at one.
1 comment:
Lisa: Very clever comic. You chose a nice selection of photos and included appropriate dialogue. I appreciated your comments about "zooming in." I agree, using comics would certainly help focus on a scene or build additional narrative. I like how you have modeled that with your comic - you created alternative dialogue as opposed to probably what was really happening.
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