Blog Entry 4: Comic Life

Comic Life is an application allowing students to easily create comic book
pages or an entire comic book. It allows students to use their own images
and drawings as panels. The author can manipulate the panels, font and background designs. The application is very simple and creates exciting presentations enjoyed by many audiences.

My Comic Life dealt with the subject of social behavior and emotions. My school has been conducting classes dealing with decision-making skills and talking about the emotions teenagers deal with in their lives. As you know the teen years can be very challenging for students and teachers alike, we are trying to help them understand it is normal to have many different emotions, but you must make good decisions in dealing with them. I created a presentation that showed various emotions being displayed by various individuals and used speech bubbles to add text the students could relate to. The Comic Life attempts to show non-verbal clues to the emotions the individuals are feeling and relate it back to the emotions the students feel on a daily basis. Comic Life places a concrete image to an abstract idea: emotions. This is highly effective for my visual learners. Comic Life literally placed a face on the emotions being described; please click the link to view the presentation.

I reviewed the article Using Comic Life in the Classroom , the author Amelia Courtis talks about the virtues of Comic Life in the classroom. She talks about the flexibility of Comic Life in the classroom and how all grades and subjects can use Comic Life in daily instruction. The author was very excited by the fact students had to use higher-thinking skills to create visual representation of ideas and concepts and it also gave the teacher more options in communicating their teaching point. Courtis thinks Comic Life is a very useful tool for the classroom and is a strong advocate of its use