Comic Maker--a great story-building app!

I have recently been playing around with a free app called "Comic Maker".  It is great in a language class for the purpose of providing students with the option of "writing" a story through the creation of a comic, rather than through traditional paragraph writing. (The creation of a digital comic could either be used as an option for differentiated instruction or as an assigned task for all).  The app allows you to select any number of pages with an assortment of layouts of frames and to choose from an assortment of settings, characters, text boxes, colours, symbols, objects, etc. and to insert them into your comic.  It is a great hands-on, colourful and creative alternative to having students simply hand write, hand draw or type out a traditional story!  As my students are starting to use the app they are finding it easy to use and engaging  and I am getting better quality work from some students who normally would not excel at story-writing. :)

Learning Surprises and Staff Collaboration!

So, the other day I had a great time discovering something new, by accident!  I had taken photos of my students on my ipad and my colleague asked if he could have them to use in our school yearbook.  So, I proceeded to click on photos with hopes to email the photos to him.  Having emailed photos many times from devices before, I know that this method (or even sharing photos via google drive) can take some time and be a bit tedious as they are downloaded/uploaded.  However, upon selecting my photos in my photo app, the ipad prompted me to share them using "Airdrop".  I had no idea what this was but I was curious and decided to try something new by following the oh-so-easy prompts on my ipad to turn on "Airdrop" in the Control Center in the settings app, on both my ipad and my colleague's ipad.  Then, with just one tap, (selecting my colleague's ipad number that suddenly appeared under the Airdrop symbol in the photo app), all 10 of my photos instantly appeared on his ipad!  It was so fast and simple!  What another great way to collaborate in the classroom and as staff! :)