My Thoughts on Comic Life

This is a HOMERUN program that I will most definitely use with my students in grades 2-5. I feel that the limited amount of time that I have with each grade level will require that they are at least comfortable navigating the computer using a mouse and a keyboard. The students in these grades are able to do this effectively. I will begin with simple projects for my second graders. I may have them create only one page for their first Comic Life presentation. I think I will have them tell a story using a picture as a prompt. I will require that they create a paper, pencil draft prior to beginning their Comic Life project. This will help them stay focused and not struggle so for words. I will have several potential clips that they can choose from already downloaded to the computer to save time. The students are familiar with Comic Life since they have seen examples of its use in the hallway on a big screen television. They know what the program can do, and I am anxious to see if all of them are able to create the stories I envision by using Comic Life. My older students will be using the program to present facts they find from researching various topics. The fourth grade students have done a wonderful job with their Native American Comic Life presentations. This program is so much fun to use and so simple. I cannot wait to further explore it and introduce it to my K-1 students! The sample is one created by one of my fourth grade students. He did a fantastic job with his presentation, and I included his last page for you to view here in this post. There were several other pages created by this student, and I have added those as a slideshow gadget to the right of this portal blog. It would have been great for the Comic Life presentation to have opened as a slide show with music. I created several versions, but could never get them to upload properly. I was finally able to get the slideshow to open using Picasa. I will keep working on getting music to embed. I would love to see the whole Comic Life project with transitions and music in my post.