I wrote about MakeBeliefsComix.com recently and thought I'd share my experience using it in the classroom with a mixed grade level high school class. The assignment was to find one current political quote and one environmental quote to use in the creation of a comic.
I had a few kids who grabbed the first thing they found from their search and plopped it into a comic bubble. Most of my students seemed to get into the assignment and spent some time trying to find just the right quote. I was pleased with the results and grabbed a few to post. (My apologies for the blurry text....can't quite get the result I want using blogger.)
Governor Palin seemed to be a popular person to quote probably because she was in the news so much at the time we did this activity.
I'll do this activity again next semester. Students were able to finish in one period (roughly 50 minutes) and the hardest part of the assignment for my kids was grabbing a screenshot. I always run across something that I think they will know and this semester, grabbing a screenshot is the one I thought they all would be able to do and very few could. None of my high schoolers had any problems using the tools in MakeBeliefsComix. They were up and running with no guidance from me.
There was some good discussion in class about what comic figures to use for their characters. We talked about how selecting different types of representations could reflect their opinion of that person. Also kids played with the size of the different characters in each frame to denote who was speaking or in some cases who was more important.
[Images all created in MakeBeliefsComix by Mr. Gunn's Multimedia class at Mountain Range High School]
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