How Can Teachers Use It?
Teachers who have reluctant writers in their classrooms may especially love Strip Designer, which allows kids to endlessly experiment with visual elements and just a little (or, if desired, a lot of) written text. Kids could use this in class to interpret a required reading assignment, to document a field trip, or to create an original story. Teachers may want to assign one page per group to help kids collaborate on a class-wide project. For younger students learning about onomatopoeia, teachers may want to use Strip Designer's stickers and caption bubbles ("POW!" and "WOW!") to bring sounds to the images.
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What's It Like?
Strip Designer lets kids use their photos and drawings to design comic-strip-style story pages in a visually creative way and share them with others. If you have students who aren't into traditional storytelling or who have trouble writing in expressive language, Strip Designer may be just what the writing coach ordered to get them excited about storytelling.
You get more than 10 strip templates, balloon-style captions, and 150 flippable stickers, as well as many fonts and colors for drawing on the photos (or drawing a standalone picture) and adding text. Students can produce comic strips -- focusing on fictional topics, or real-life topics with photos of themselves -- to share with others via social networks or to print a book. Students simply tap "new" on the main screen to create a comic page. Then they start compiling photos, words, drawings, and stickers.
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Is It Good For Learning?
There's no end to the visually cool, attention-grabbing stories kids can tell using Strip Designer. With a little work and a lot of imagination, a few pictures, stickers, and a text bubble or two, this app may be worth 1,000 words. The option icons are relatively self-explanatory, but tweaking the size and spots of the photos, frames, text bubbles, and more may still be frustrating for new or younger users, decreasing engagement. There's a basic tutorial and FAQ under the app's Help tab, but a video tutorial would be nice. Each page saves on a main My Comics page, and it's as easy as tapping Share to send a comic page via email, Facebook, Twitter, or via a PDF file and more.
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Use photos, drawings, and other images to enhance the visual expression.
Students can get as complex with their comic designs as time and their imaginations will allow.
Use of multiple photos, colors, words, and stickers can help set the tone of a comic's story.
Expressive words in stickers help younger users tell simple stories with action.
Students can share comic pages via social media, or print them out.
