OllieBray.com

More classroom comic creators

I’ve had lots of good feedback on my original post about Crating Comics in the classroom with tools like Comic Brush, Pixton and PowerPoint. As a result I have been sent a couple more links to some great on-line comic creators.

The first link was from Alessio Bernardelli (@asober on Twitter) – Alessio also write an excellent education blog which gives his perspective on education as an Italian working in the Welsh Valleys.

Alessio told me about the Read, Write and Think Comic Creator.

The Read, Write and Think Comic Creator is quite a good little flash based tool that allows you to change backgrounds, add characters, speech bubbles and props. You can make 1, 2, 3 or 6 section comics that appear hand drawn.

The disadvantage of the creator is that you can’t save the comics to come back to them at a later date or export them as a picture file. The website does allow you to print the comics off.

Anyone tried using this particular generator with children?

The second comic generators that I was told about came from Jonathon Wylie who writes the Education Technology Blog. Jonathon pointed out the Marvel Superhero Create your own Comic Generator. Its fantastic, you can create 1-3 panel comic strips or books up to 21 pages. You can choose from a variety of Marvel characters to enhance the feel of your very own superhero comic.

The Marvel Superhero comic generator is very intuitive to use – its just a shame that you can’t add your own pictures.

Again, anyone tried using this particular generator with children?

Finally, I was reminded by David Muir that this year is Asterix’s 50th Birthday. There are lots of great resources over on the Official Asterix Website that could be used to help deliver a variety of curriculum areas for example art and design, literacy and modern languages.

The Tempest from Classical Comics

I have spoken before about my passion for graphic novels and how I think they are so engaging for encouraging literacy and creativity within young people. There are lots of types of graphic novels that are available for teachers and Learning and Teaching Scotland has published a great graphic novels resource for professionals who might be interested in this subject.

For schools wanting to get into graphic novels you can’t beat the work from Classical Comics. I've written about their Macbeth and Henry V work before and also how it is available electronically for you to use with your class or even add your own speech bubbles!

Anyway, Classical Comics have also just recently released The Tempest as a graphic novel. It is written by William Shakespeare, scripted by John McDonald, penciled by Jon Haward and inked by Gary Erskine. 

As before with all the Classical Comics releases there are three editions:

1. Original text version: Ideal for purists, students and readers who will appreciate the unaltered text.

2. Plain text: The full text made more accessible by the translation into modern English.

3. Quick text: The full play in comic book form, translated into modern English and with less dialogue for a faster paced read.

There are PDFs  available on the Classical Comics website that explain all three available formats in more detail.

According to Gary Erskine’s blog, 'there are more books planned and the future brings other classic authors to the graphic novel treatment soon'. Great Stuff - I can't wait to see what they come up with next!

Creating Classroom Comics

Regular readers of this website will no that I have a real passion for the use of comics and graphic novels in the classroom. My favorite free on-line comic creation tools at the moment are Comic Brush and Pixton.

Comic Brush (www.comicbrush.com) is a bit like a free version of Comic Life and it allows you to make on-line comics for the iPhone / iPod, comic strips and full length comics. It is easy to use and you can either insert your own pictures into the comic strip or download an art pack (small charge) or do a bit of both. The art packs are great as they allow you to introduce licensed characters / artwork such Judge Dread or manga into your comics.

Here is an example of a comic brush comic that I made quickly about the recent Handheld Learning 2009 Conference. All the pictures I have used in the comic were taken by James Clay.

(click on the image to make it bigger)

Pixton (www.pixton.com) is equally as good but serves a different purpose. With Pixton you can really develop the fine detail of a character right down to facial expression and gestures. Pixton is free to use but you can also pay for an education license that gives the teacher more control over student accounts.

Here is a quick example of a pixton comic that I used recently to set some tasks at a recent Learning and Teaching Scotland whole staff event.

The problem is despite these tools being free they may be blocked by some local education authorities and they rely on a reasonable bandwidth in order for them to work properly.

As a result I like to remind teachers that you can actually produce fairly good comics in PowerPoint. I recently produced an Innovative Teacher InnoVid on the subject which some people may find interesting (version embeded below).

You can find out more information about InnoVids here.

And if thats not enough comic stuff for you you could also have a look at these 100 tips, tools and resources for teachers.

SLF09 - Computer Games Based Learning in Secondary Schools

Over the next week I hope to post up my thoughts, presentation slides and reflections from this years Scottish Learning Festival.

To start with here are my presentation slides and links from my session on Computer Games Based learning in Secondary Schools

Games Based Learning in Secondary Schools

View more presentations from Learning and Teaching Scotland.

The links that I referred to in my presentation are as follows:

• Wordle – Create fantastic Word Clouds to brighten up your lessons and also analise important documents.

Some examples of web based games that can be used for home learning:

• Classic Sim City – Useful for teaching about towns, cities and settlement.
• Ordnance Survey Map Games – Good for homework.
• Fantasy Famer – Manage a farm for a year
• Stop Disasters Simulator – Can you protect the world against floods, volcanoes, earthquakes and other nasty stuff?
• Sim Sweat Shop – What is it really like working in a sweat shop in a less economically developed country?
• An idea for setting web based games for homework activities

 

Games Based Learning to help Transition between Primary to Secondary Education:

• 

  The Musselburgh Grammar School Guitar Hero Transition Project – Background Information and Timeline
• MGS Guitar Hero Transition Project – Part Two: The Virtual Battle of the Bands
• Guitar Hero Showcase: I love it when a plan comes together!
• Musselburgh Guitar Hero Project Features in the Times Educational Supplement
• Cluster Project that plays to all talents.
• SLF 2008: Enriched Assessment for Enriched Enquiry

In East Lothian we are rolled out this project to all P7 classes across the county. The 2009 version of the project will used Guitar Hero World Tour for the XBox. World Tour is particularly good as there is more than one instument, which provides more choise of students.

Partnership with Parents:

• Internet Safety and Responsible Use: How to set family settings on games consoles

 

The Use of the Nintendo DS

Some of the titles mentioned:

• Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training: How Old Is Your Brain?
• Big Brain Academy
• My Word Coach
• Maths Training
• My French Coach
• Hotel Dusk - A good narative driven game to encorage reading and provide a context for other work
• Nintendogs - A great game to provide a context for learning (Aberdeenshire have been doing some fantastic work using this game in P2)
• Drawn to Life - Being used in P3 to develop writing and storytelling skills

The Use of the Sony PSP

Lots of good information on how the PSP can be used for education on the ConnectEd website. Hot Brain for the PSP is a similar to lots of the Brain Training title you can get for the DS.

Also have a look at SUMS Online - they make great software for computers and other handheld devicces includeing the PSP.

Storage Solutions for Games Consoles

ConnectEd have made a fantastic storage solution for the PSP – hopefully they will also soon have one on the market for the Nintendo DS.

The Use of the Nintendo Wii

Some of the titles mentioned:

• Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree (currently being used in SfL)
• Endless Ocean (A great game to provide a context for learning)
• Wii Sports
• Mario and Sonic at the Olympics (A great game to provide a context for learning)
• Dancing Stage
• My French Coach

Graphic Novels

• Classical Comics
• Manga Shakespeare

 

Games Design

• Mission Maker
  
• 2Simple DIY is also an excellent game for encouraging games Design in the early years. (you can see my efforts here)

Exergaming:

• Wii Sports
• Dance Mats (Zig Zag Dance Mats)
• EA Active Sports

Other Links:

• Learning and Teaching Scotland Consolarium
• Learning and Teaching Scotland
• Ideas Network Scotland: Innovation and Development in Education

21st Century Teaching Tools: South Lanarkshire

 

Last Wednesday evening nearly 100 South Lanarkshire teachers turned out to hear me talk about 21st Century Learning Tools. Jaye Richards did an excellent 15 minute job of warming up the audience with a great thought piece and the whole evening was organized by Andrea Reid (who is now on Twitter).

Here are most of the slides that I refered to during the presenation:

21st Century Teaching Tools

View more presentations from olliebray.

I also referred to the following links:

1. The use of ICT

Generators

Use generators to liven up your lessons and to set learning / home learning objectives in a more creative way. Some good examples include:

• Fodey – Includes the famous wizard text and the newspaper generator

• Wordle – Turn paragraphs of text into beautiful work clouds (try it with your exam syllabus departmental development plan or anything else you can think of!)

• Smoke Signal Generator - Make smoke signals come out of your location.

2. 21st Century Students

21st century students are a new bread of student. They exist in a high tech, multimedia and glamorized world. We need to be prepared for this in our classrooms.

Tips:

• Think about your own on-line presence (social networking, ex-directory in the phonebook, be carful what you post etc…)

• Make sure you know what resources your students have at home. For example how many of them have a computer with Internet access? How many have the capacity to play an mp3 file? How many have a games consol? If you don’t know this information how will you set appropriate and imaginative home learning tasks and get a real understanding of prior learning?

• Knowing your students also means you can set appropriate assessment tasks.

3. The Basic Tools

Search

Tips and good search engines:

• Use the Advanced Google Search – remember you can use this to get specific file type returns such as just PowerPoint or shockwave flash (animation) files.

• Quintura provides a really good visual search – excellent to use with children on project work.

• Google News

  – searches the most up-to-date news web sites

Images

• Don't forget Advanced Google Image Search

• Flickr

  can often provide really good and powerful images that can be used in education without breach of copyright.

• BigHugeLabs lets you do all sorts of things with images such as make motivational posters.

• The BBC Day in Pictures – great starter or discussion activity.

• The BBC 3 minute news bulletin – children like to watch the news if you give them the chance!

3. The audience tools

Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, podcasts and wikis allow you to quickly publish information to the Internet. Most importantly they can be used as an alternative to traditional assessment and give the children a real sense of audience. Use these tools to make your own World Wide Wall Display.

Some Good Blogging Tools include wordpress, blogger and typepad.

Audacity is a free audio editing piece of software that will also w you to edit voice and audio recordings. It is also available as a Portable App – which means you can run it off a memory stick.

Think about getting your students to write Wikipedia articles.

CANVAS (Children’s Art in the Virtual Arena of Scotland) – A new LTS project. More information here.

5. The Creative Tools

Comic Brush – On-line comic book creator (a bit like Comic Life – but free!)

Pixton – Sophisticated on-line comic book creator

Go Animate – Robust on-line combined on-line / animation software

6. Cross Curricular Tools

Google Earth – Watch my 15 minute mini-note from Teachmeet NorthEast on how to use Google Earth in the Classroom here.


7. EDUtainment (learning through play)

Good case studies of games based learning available on the LTS Consolarium website:
here are some examples of web based games that can be used for home learning:

• Classic Sim City – Useful for teaching about towns, cities and settlement.
• Ordnance Survey Map Games – Good for homework.
• Fantasy Famer – Manage a farm for a year
• Stop Disasters Simulator – Can you protect the world against floods, volcanoes, earthquakes and other nasty stuff?
• Sim Sweat Shop – What is it really like working in a sweat shop in a less economically developed country?
• An idea for setting web based games for homework activities

8. ICT Strategy

• Your school must have an ICT strategy. This is not the same as an ICT policy.

9. Don't stop learning

The future of CPD is on-line:

• Find CPD opertunities using CPD Find

• Record your CPD using CPD reflect

• Download CPD from LTS iTunes U

• Take part in a CPD event in GLOW (eg: Glowing Thursday’s?)

Develop your personal learning network by finding out more about:

• Teachers TV – good classroom and professional development resources

• Slideshare – A place to up-load and view PowerPoint and other presentations

• Microsoft Innovative Teachers Network – join and collaborate with teachers globally

• Twitter –

  A micro blogging service. You can follow me here.

10. Finally

Please leave any comments and feedback from the presentation below.

Graphic Novels in Education at the Edinburgh Book Festival 2009

I still believe that Graphic Novels and comics have huge potential in the development of literacy skills for young people. I have been absolutely convinced about this since seeing Dr Mel Gibson talk about Graphic Novels in education back in April last year at the National Library of Scotland.

Around the same time I also went to a talk by Garry Erskine and was equally inspired by his work on some the Classical Comic Series (and also Dan Dare!).

Dr Mel is speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Thursday the 20th of August at 17:00, with her talk entitled Visual Literacy, Learning & Graphic Novels. If you’re a teacher in Scotland and you can’t make it along to the book festival Learning and Teaching Scotland will be broadcasting the presentation live in GLOW meet. For more information on how to join the GLOW group have a look at this post over on the GLOW blog as this promises to be a really inspiring hour about what comics and graphic novels can do for young people.

Gary Erskine is also speaking at the Book Festival on Monday 24th August 2009 at 5.30pm where he will be running a 'How to Draw Comics' class.

If your interested in some of the ways that graphic novels can be used in schools why don’t you have a look at this on-line resource from Learning and Teaching Scotland or click on the ‘Graphic Novels’ category of this website to see some of my previous work and thoughts.

iGoogle Comic Themes

A couple of months ago Google released some pretty cool computer game iGoogle themes. Unsurprisingly, the Guitar hero themes was one of my favorites!

This week to celebrate the 40^th Anniversary of Comic Con in the United Sates they have also launched a range of comic book themes for iGoogle. You can browse the gallery of themes at www.google.com/comicsthemes to choose from a range of popular comic book characters to liven up your home page.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Superman

Iron Man

Garfield

Popeye

Batman

One of the great things about iGoogle is its highly customizable nature from thousands of widgets and hundreds of themes. It will be interesting to see if iGoogle eventually becomes fully integrated into Google Apps for education. The customizable but safe nature of the iGoogle themes will be particularly appealing for children and for schools.

For the moment I have selected the batman theme for my iGoogle page. Batman fans may also be interested in the location of the batcave – which can been found here on Google Streetview (link to: Google Sightseeing).

Computer Games Based Learning in Scottish Schools – NAACE Strategic Conference, Blackpool, March 2009

Below are a copy of my slides and on-line handout for the break out session that I ran at the NAACE Strategic Conference in Blackpool on the 4^th March 2009.

A slideshare version of the presentation can be found here.

The links that I referred to in my presentation are as follows:

• Wordle – Create fantastic Word Clouds to brighten up your lessons and also analise important documents.
• Promethean Active Expression – A world class Interactive Voting System.

Some examples of web based games that can be used for home learning:

• Classic Sim City – Useful for teaching about towns, cities and settlement.
• Ordnance Survey Map Games – Good for homework.
• Fantasy Famer – Manage a farm for a year
• Stop Disasters Simulator – Can you protect the world against floods, volcanoes, earthquakes and other nasty stuff?
• Sim Sweat Shop – What is it really like working in a sweat shop in a less economically developed country?
• An idea for setting web based games for homework activities

 

Games Based Learning to help Transition between Primary to Secondary Education:

• The Musselburgh Grammar School Guitar Hero Transition Project – Background Information and Timeline
• MGS Guitar Hero Transition Project – Part Two: The Virtual Battle of the Bands
• Guitar Hero Showcase: I love it when a plan comes together!
• Musselburgh Guitar Hero Project Features in the Times Educational Supplement
• Cluster Project that plays to all talents.
• SLF 2008: Enriched Assessment for Enriched Enquiry

In East Lothian we are rolling out this project to all P7 classes across the county. The 2009 version of the project will use Guitar Hero World Tour for the XBox. World Tour is particularly good as their is more than one instument, which provides more choise of students.

Partnership with Parents:

• Internet Safety and Responsible Use: How to set family settings on games consoles

 

The Use of the Nintendo DS

Some of the titles mentioned:

• Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training: How Old Is Your Brain?
• Big Brain Academy
• My Word Coach
• Maths Training
• My French Coach
• Hotel Dusk - A good narative driven game to encorage reading and provide a context for other work
• Nintendogs - A great game to provide a context for learning (Aberdeenshire have been doing some fantastic work using this game in P2)
• Drawn to Life - Being used in P3 to develop writing and storytelling skills

The Use of the Sony PSP

Lots of good information on how the PSP can be used for education on the ConnectEd website. Hot Brain for the PSP is a similar to lots of the Brain Training title you can get for the DS. Also have a look at SUMS Online - they make great software for computers and other handheld devicces includeing the PSP.

Storage Solutions for Games Consoles

ConnectEd have made a fantastic storage solution for the PSP – hopefully they will also soon have one on the market for the Nintendo DS.

The Use of the Nintendo Wii

Some of the titles mentioned:

• Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree (currently being used in SfL)
• Endless Ocean (A great game to provide a context for learning)
• Wii Sports
• Mario and Sonic at the Olympics (A great game to provide a context for learning)
• Dancing Stage
• My French Coach

Graphic Novels

• Classical Comics
• Manga Shakespeare

The Play Station:

We are currently using Buzz the Schools Quiz and are looking forward to evaluation Buzz the Hollywood Quiz as soon as we get a copy? I am sure that there will also be Education Version of Buzz for the PS3 coming out at some point?

Games Design

• We have a site license for Mission Maker and will be exploring the possibilities for using this game to develop literacy and International links over the next 12 months.
• 2Simple DIY is also an excellent game for encouraging games Design in the early years. (you can see my efforts here)

Exergaming:

• Wii Sports
• Dance Mats (Zig Zag Dance Mats)
• EA Active Sports Coming Soon

Other Links:

• Learning and Teaching Scotland Consolarium
• Learning and Teaching Scotland
• Ideas Network Scotland: Innovation and Development in Education

The Watchmen Movie Coming Soon: some resources to also help bring it to your classroom

 

The whole world seems to be gearing up for the new Watchmen Movie. I loved the award winning graphic novel and I'm really looking forward to the film. With just under one month to go I noticed that paramount are really starting to push the advertising for this movie – it’s been all over a number of websites today. Including the Yahoo home page.

If you have not seen it the third Watchmen Trailer is now available to view on YouTube and it looks fantastic. I’ve embedded it below.

 

For English teachers interested in studying this text with their class the official Watchmen homepage also give lots of background information on the film and the characters. All of these resources could be used as a rich classroom resource.

I also came across an excellent set of flikr photographs that could also be used to assist with studying the text or to inspire classroom discussion. I really like the photograph of Dr Manhattan photographing Neil Armstrong during the Apollo moon landings (July 20th, 1969). I also like the old newspaper clips.

Is anybody thinking of making use of hype surrounding the movie and studying the Watchmen with an English class either as a one off or unit or work?

BETT 2009 – Pixton (create great comics in no time at all)

One of the coolest products that I saw at BETT 2009 was Pixton – I instantly thought that it was a great little fun resource that I could start using in my classroom straight away.

Pixton is a social media website where you create comics − without having to draw. People of all ages can share, remix, and publish their ideas, opinions, and stories to a worldwide audience. To find out more about Pixton view the video below:

 

Its key features are:

Easy to use comic creator: build a comic from scratch or choose from a library of templates.

Fully customizable characters: any age, ethnic background, or gender by choosing hair and skin colour, height and girth, and much more.

Articulate characters: bring them to life by rotating individual body parts, or selecting from preset poses and facial expressions. Simply click and drag!

Share with the world: publish, email and embed comics in your blog. Comics and comments are automatically translated to and from other languages.

Remix and collaborate: edit a copy of any comic to add your own twist. Because remixes are listed below the original comic, you can follow its evolution!

Community: create a Pixton avatar, win fans and make friends! Pinpoint them on your own Google map, send messages, and share comics.

There are two versions of Pixton. A free version where you have to set up individual accounts or a paid version where the teacher can monitor the classes comics. The latter is quite expensive –but I don’t see why you couldn’t just use the free one with your classes or the paid version if you value the added security.

I’m looking forward to trying out this resource with a class sometime over the next couple of weeks.