Comics are a great way of telling a story. They can be used to do the following:
- Creating hypothetical situations that could happen in real life (for example, a conflict or a funny situation)
- Creating a storyboard for a movie
- Narrating an event
If you are getting worried that we will have to draw something and your skills are, well, those of a 10-year old kid, that's not a problem as mine aren't that good either! Fortunately, there's a tool just for you and me called Stripgenerator , which will save us from further humiliation in front of our students and colleagues. In our course in Moodle, in Module 5, Being a musician, we will design an activity where students have to create a story based on a day in the life of a musician, and they will be required to use this tool to illustrate this. We can then add this work to the Moodle course easily as an attachment to a forum.
Stripgenerator (http://stripgenerator.com/) is an online tool for creating comic strips with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface that makes creating comics look simple.
You can see some of the examples that other comic strip artists did by going to the strip blog gallery or by searching for some keywords. Here's one as an example about a lesson in sharing:
Source: fanton (2007, April 26). A lesson in sharing. Retrieved October 17, 2009, from http://welcometocartoon.stripgenerator.com/2007/04/26/a-lesson-in-sharing.html
To start a comic strip, you'll first have to create an account. Once you are done with that, click on the CREATE NEW STRIP button on the right.
We are then presented with the following workspace to start building the comic strip:
On the top of the blank strip, we can see some tabs. This is where we can select frames, characters, items, text, check the library, or get theme packs. The three white rectangles (frames) are actually where we will make our story by dragging the elements from the top into them. Note that we can't upload any pictures, so we are limited to the elements provided.
The editing tools in the toolbar below the three frames allow us to delete elements, send them to the back of other elements, flip, format text in bubbles, zoom in or out, and so on. We just need to hover the mouse over these buttons to see their functions.
When we add an element to a frame, we can also move, resize, or rotate it, by either dragging it around or by using the small boxes on the object's boundary.
After we are done creating a comic strip, we just have to follow these steps to publish it to Moodle:
After we publish it, we see the final result, and if we click on the tab Share&Promote, we get information for embedding the strip on our course or a direct image link if we want to save the image to our computer and then upload it to Moodle as a forum attachment, as seen in the following screenshot:
Now that we know how to create comic strips, let's have a look at some basic procedures that we can execute to integrate presentations into our courses.