Sunday, September 25, 2016

Creating Comic Strips for Grades 6 & 7

Storyboards are a great planning tool for writing and a great way to retell the plot or important events in a story you've read.  There are many different online comic strip makers that can be used to storyboard.  Today you will have a chance to explore a few different comic strip making programs.  Play around with them, see what you like in each.  Be prepared to choose one to share interesting or cool feature that you discover today with the class. (Information below is taken from Free Technology for Teachers)

 Pixton and Storyboard That are both good platforms for creating comic strips. 

Make Beliefs Comix offers comic strip templates and writing prompts in up to seven languages. The templates and prompts can be completed online or you can print them out. Make Beliefs Comix iPad app supports the creation of comics in seven languages; English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Latin. To create comics in the Make Beliefs Comix you simply select the number of frames you want to use then choose the characters that you want to feature in your story. After choosing your frames and characters you can type text into speech bubbles to tell your story.

Comic Master is a free tool designed for students to use to create comics in the "graphic novel style" that is popular with a lot of kids in the ten to fourteen years old age range. Comic Master provides a drag and drop interface for students to build their comics on. Students using Comic Master can select from a variety of layouts, backgrounds, characters, effects, and fonts.

Witty Comics provides a simple platform to create two character dialogues. To use Witty Comics students just need to select the pre-drawn background scenes and the pre-drawn characters they want to feature in their comics. Writing the dialogues is the creative element that is left to the students.

Write Comics is a free, simple tool for creating comic strips. Write Comics doesn't require any registration to use. In fact, registration is not even an option. To create a comic on Write Comics just select a background from the menu, choose some characters, and add some speech bubbles. You can continue adding frames until you've completed your story.