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. :)

education + creation = EDUCREATIONS!

Hello All
Nice to read about the various uses and ideas surrounding our new tech!  :)

For the past few weeks I have had my students using the i-pads in a variety of ways.  Below is a list of activities they have been doing collaboratively or individually with the assistance of i-pads.

1) Using the Educreations app, students have made posters that are interactive.  Upon designing a poster that has traditional images and text, they have also added music, their own narration and extra drawings or images that appear throughout the recording of their poster "show".  This activity was very successful.  Students were engaged, had fun, were able to take their creativity to the next level and became quite proficient with it, very quickly.  They then shared their posters in various ways-- with a partner, in a carousel seating and in front of the whole class.

2) Using the Videolicious app, students created 1 min. films (with images, film clips, background music and voice over) of a description of a character from the novel we were reading or of an advertisement for a product (media study).

3) Currently, as a course culminating activity in French, students are creating their own short films.  They are collaborating and working on their scripts at school and from home using Google Drive and are using the i-movie app to film and edit their work.  I am still learning how to use this app in order to train them through this.  They are SO EXCITED about the real time nature of Google drive and are thrilled to create movies as a final task.

4)  Currently, another class has written children's short stories (for thier grade 1 reading buddies) and would like to create digital, interactive versions of their texts.  Using the Educreations app or the Book Creator app, they will record images of their books and of their voices reading the books, page by page.  This will provide an excellent resource for the grade 1 buddies to have digital story books that they can read, listen to, and follow along.

It's been a great start and I am excited to learn more and implement more ideas!
Cheers!
Rebeka