I chose to do my first emerging technology on MakeBeliefsComix. This is a website where students are able to create their own comic strips. It can be an innovative way to get kids to tell a story. There are pre-made story ideas for teachers to choose. I believe MakeBeliefsComix can be an innovative way to enrich the curriculum.
When you create a comic strip the first choice you have to make is how many panels you want to use. The creator can choose two, three, or four panels to make their comic strip. Once you have decided that you can change the backgrounds of each individual panel. There are twenty different characters to add into your story. Each has four different emotion looks. There are twenty objects that can be added and four sizes of talk and thought bubbles. When you are adding the characters into the panels you can resize them with the scale button or move them to a different location with the move button. One can also flip the images after they have placed them. With all of the premade objects and characters it allows someone who has trouble drawing the ability to create their own comic strip.
To test how kids would react to this way of learning I had my students create comic strips after they had finished their other work. I allowed the students creative freedom in how they made their comic, however I made them choose a story idea from the site. Creating comic strips were very exciting to many of them, even though there were a few that struggled with it because they felt they were not very creative. I randomly selected to include a few comics to show what the kids in my class created. After testing this out I felt that this website is a great way to tie into other curriculums. After kids read a passage from a piece of literary work they could make a comic strip about what took place. This is a great way to get kids out of memorization and into creating something. Even though this is a great way to get kids creating there are some limitations.
There are a few shortcomings on this site, however they are minor and do not take away from the experience as much. The first is that you cannot save the comic strips after you create them. You can only print or email them. Sometimes when creating the comics the text bubbles would not allow the user to put text in when there were multiple objects on the panel, however it can be corrected when you use the bring to front button on the left side. Students also need to be careful not to click any links or the back or forward buttons because if they do they will lose all of their hard work. The biggest limitation from this site would be that the biggest comic you can create has a max size of four panels. I would have like for the students to be able to make larger comic like a small comic book. I also found that just like anything some kids can create things faster than others so that can lead to disruptions in the classroom unless you have a plan for the students who finish early.
Since I teach in a computer lab in the related arts department I would like to work with my fellow English and social studies teachers to try to get kids creating comic strips on what they learned. From my experiment with having the kids use this website, I found that most of them really enjoyed using it. With the help of my colleagues I believe we can utilize this resource to educate kids. After all learning should be fun.
Below are some of the comic strips I chose at random to post in my blog:
All comics were created at
http://www.makebeliefscomix.com
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