Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Comic Life


Everyone is into Comic Life it seems everywhere I go people are wanting to use it, learn to use it or use it better or for something different.

Today I worked with the staff at Sacred Heart on Comic Life, they are all at various stages and wanting to use it quite differently. Learning to use it is fairly straight forward, thinking about how to get the most out of Comic Life in your classroom is where you energy needs to go.

Jenny, Brian and Kath are all planning to use Comic Life in their classroom in different ways. Brian has been investigating the way Comic Life has been used to create word art, or word shape. He used a picture as a background in comic life and then used the lettering tool to make the words take the shape of the image. There are some examples here. Later he can delete the photo. The learning here is in word choice and vocabulary. Students make the word art from words that relate to the image.

One thing that is important for people to realize when they use Comic Life is that when you save you are saving your comic as a comic life file. This means it can only be opened in comic life. If you want to make your comic into a jpg or another type of picture file, go to the file menu, and choose export. You can then export your comic as a picture and save it to your computer. You can put this into word, email it, put it on a blog or wiki easily in this format and everyone can view it if they do not have comic life.

Jenny was using Kid Pix files she exported these as pictures (jpg) and then used them in Comic Life.
Kath and Jenny will be using Comic Life as a way of sharing work and for students to sequence events, particularly learning experiences. Telling stories through images.

Link to our wiki to learn more about Comic Life and how you could use it in the classroom.

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