Comic Life presentations

I had my students export their Comic Life pages as HTML files so we could use the projectors to show the whole class at once. It went very well, they found out that like a powerpoint the font and color scheme you use makes a difference. Also some of the text was a little distorted at times so the class would ask questions for clarification. I really liked that part because it helped the group presenting understand that if they were to make a stand alone comic they would have to make sure it was clear enough for their audience to understand.

Using Comic Life also kind of forced them to be more to the point, so they chose their words carefully. Though many students took notes from the pages, looking at quiz scores, I don't think it was any different than doing a powerpoint or poster to deliver their message. They did like it better so from that point of view it was a nice change from what they do in other classes. I'm sure I'll use it again with a few tweeks here and there, but overall, it was worth doing.

More on Life, Comic Life that is

Today was the last day for my students to work on their Comic Life pages. I was pleasantly surprised by how many of them really got into making their pages. I even had a few after school today, so they could tweek a few things to make it just right. One student after 30 mins after school shouted out that he loved doing this and we should do it more often! I'll see tomorrow when we all read them how well I like doing this.

What I have seen so far is that they are being very concise in what they are saying. I was worried that they may just load it up with pictures and not really have anything worth saying. What I'm finding is that they have put a lot of thought into what they are doing, maybe because they know everyone is going to be reading them and taking a test on the material that they are presenting. I took some standard test questions from the data base to use as a quiz, we'll see how well they do.

Crazy Day

We were in the state championship girls b-ball tournament today. We beat Blaine 73 to 34. The reason I bring it up is that most of our students were at the game so we had very few in class. Some of those that couldn't go to the game wanted to watch the game since they told us it would be broadcast on the net. This too seemed to be blocked, we could get the audio but not the video. Like we saw in class last night you just never know what is going to get blocked that you never thought would.

Having most of the students gone today did give me a chance to play around a little more with Comic Life. The more I use it the more I like it. I did make a tutorial about how to use some of the equipment they will be using in the lab and it was so easy to put together. I like the fact that you can save it as HTML and then show it in color instead of printing in black and white.

Podcasting

We had a podcasting workshop after school Monday and it was really neat.
The more we played around with it the more I could see the uses for doing them. I thought being able to make a podcast that shows step by step how to use a meter or other piece of equipment we use in our labs would be very useful for those students that miss class that day. I have some other thoughts but I think I'll wait until after our mili class tonight, which happens to be on podcasting to see what new things I can learn.

More on Comic Life

I've got a student teacher who is kind of a comic book buff, so I ran my idea by him to use Comic Life in class. He gave me a wonderfully puzzled look, like really, you want to have students teach each other using comics. Yep, I told him. He then got a little nervous and asked if I could explain in a little more detail what I had in mind. It's always fun to make your student teachers stop and think;) So I laid out for him my idea and told him he could do what he wanted but that was what I was going to do for the next chapter. I'm looking forward to it, I like doing things that make students question what they are learning and why. I have some very talented students that I know will really come to life with this assignment. We are going to start the middle of next week and I can't wait.

Comic Life

I stopped in to see Exploradora in the Mac lab yesterday and they were using Comic Life to do an assignment. I started thinking about ways that I could use that in my science class as an alternate way of assessing my students knowledge. Many times I have students draw out or use pictures to aid in their description of an event they observe in the lab. I was wondering if anyone has used this as an alternate way of testing?