Teaching with Comics

I attended the MLTI Summer Institute in Castine last week and my 3-hour session on Promoting Literacy with Cartoons, Comics and Graphic Novels went well. The participants were a very diverse group of teachers but I think everyone left with some ideas for introducing comics and graphic novels into their curricula. Mark, one of the participants, live blogged the session using Cover It Live and you can see the results on his Cooked on Education blog.

I distributed a NoteShare notebook that is now available on the ACTEM NoteShare server. If you have NoteShare, you can view and download it there. (Contact me if you need directions.) If you don’t have NoteShare you can view it in your browser. It’s in the Barbara Greenstone Collection and it’s named teach_comics. The password is actem.

I think the most powerful part of the session was Andrew’s Monster Party comic. It’s a 6-page “silent comic” that tells a simple story. Here’s the first page:

I wanted to display it on the wall in the room as well as in the NoteShare notebook so I uploaded each page to the Block Posters site and blew it up to 4 sheets (portrait) by 4. I printed it and then mounted each page on a 30″ x 40″ foam board so I had six big panels which I lined up on the tray of this huge white board that stretched along one wall of the room. That got everyone’s attention.

We spent a long time talking about all the possibilities for using wordless comics. We brainstormed a word list to use as a word well and then everyone took some time to write the story. We then talked about the 6 traits of writing in the context of the stories they wrote. You could also use a comic like this to teach vocabulary to ESL students or in a foreign language class.

The teachers loved it so I suggested to Andrew that he create more of these silent comics. We’ll see if he takes my advice…

In the fall of 2006 the Maine Learning Technology Initiative distributed new iBooks to all 7th and 8th grade teachers and students, replacing the four-year-old devices of the first deployment. These new laptops had some new software. One new title was Comic Life. I had seen it and even played with it a little beforehand but I really started thinking about it when it became available to everyone.

If you haven’t seen it, go to the Plasq site and take a look. It’s a tool that allows you to create comics using images from your photo collection. I knew right away that kids were going to love this but I wanted to have some solid rationale for having kids create comics (other than it’s fun). It turned out that there are lots of good reasons for using Comic Life in school and I’ll talk more about this in future posts.

Because of the sequential nature of comic art it became clear that teachers and students could use comics when explaining processes. Teachers could use it to demonstrate step-by-step directions. Students could use it as an alternative to the written science lab report. I needed an example of this so I turned to my resident artist (my son) and asked him to create a comic in Comic Life that would demonstrate a process and I suggested it would be cool if he used his drawings rather than photos. He agreed and made this little comic about how to make a comic with your own drawings:

Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words.