BP15_2009113_Chuck_Mill's_Site

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2009

I have spent countless hours scouring the Internet for Web 2.0 tools.

The Emergent Technologies in a Collaborative Culture (ETC) course requires researching and blogging about Web 2.0 tools but my motivation for locating excellent tools goes beyond the requirements of this course. My Action Research project draws upon Web 2.0 tools and the introduction of several of them to my students. Additionally, having extra tools in the teacher’s toolkit is a good thing. I have had a lot of fun researching, experimenting with and evaluating these tools.

I have always been intrigued by comic books. Growing up, my older brothers had quite the collection of Superman, Batman and the Archies. I wanted to find some type of a comic strip layout tool I could introduce to my classes. I teach Video Graphics and I am looking for small interesting projects that include a writing component. A short comic strip about school life just might be something the students are interested in.

In researching the Web I found several different comic strip tools. Most were not free so that caused me to move in another direction. I did find one that I think meets the needs of this particular project. It is called Comic Strip Creator. It is available as a free download but works only with Windows. Since there is only one Mac computer in my entire school (a loaner from Apple), this will not be a problem. After downloading the program I could not get it to work. I sent the company an email and they responded the next day saying I needed to “turn off” any anti virus software installed on the computer. It installed like a dream after I did this.

Comic Strip Creator is great. I laid out this comic strip in about 3 minutes. In addition to downloading the program, there is also a download for clip art and backgrounds. I used both of them in this example. And finally, a word to the wise… be careful when searching for the site. The correct url is listed below. Changing the .org to .com may “strip” you of all rights as a teacher!

http://www.comicstripcreator.org/

POSTED BY CMILLS AT 5:03 PM

My comment:

Chuck,


Thanks for this website! One of the best times I had in this course so far, and I felt I was at my most creative is when my daughter and I played around with ComicLife. I then got serious about the project for the month and worked diligently to create a meaningful product for the class. I turned around and tried to use ComicLife in my class but to no avail. We ended up drawing cartoons for Lady Macbeth-Villainess extraordinaire but I wanted students to use my two classroom computers to create digital cartoon strips as we only have PCs. Hopefully you have provided me the answer.