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Teacher Review for Superhero Comic Book Maker

Fun digital storytelling tool for open-ended creativity K - 3, but academic potential for older students may be limited

Emily S.
 Technology coordinator
Holly Hills Elementary School
Denver, United States
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My Grades K, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
My Subjects English Language Arts, Math, Science, Social Studies
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My Rating
Learning Scores
Engagement
Pedagogy
Support
My Students Liked It Yes
My Students Learned Yes
I Would Recommend It Yes
Setup Time Less than 5 minutes
Great for Creation
Individual
Student-driven work
Great with ELL
General
Low literacy
Special needs
How I Use It
This is a great digital storytelling tool! The option to animate stickers during recording and pull in your own backgrounds give it more potential for creative storytelling. Students can write and record stories during Daily 5 centers, and teachers and/or students can record "commercials" for lessons. For example, when learning about the "r" sound, teachers or students could create a commercial for the superhero triplets er, ir, an ur, You can find them in different words, but they all sound the same. (See the Common Sense Media edmodo group for a "commercial" example.) You could also create superhero commercials for verb man and his little sister side kick helping verb! Animating vocabulary, verbs, nouns, idioms, adjectives, etc. would be another great use for this app.
My Take
Pros: The explicit instructions are spoken every time, so very young learners can use this app independently. Students can record their voice while moving the stickers to create a multimedia comic strip. You can add backgrounds from your camera roll and save comic strips you make to your camera roll which gives you a lot of options for app smashing (combining 2 or more programs into one multimedia project.) Within the app, you can create different comic strips and drop them on top of each other in order to put the scenes together into one comic strip. Cons: It is geared toward a very young audience, and while it could have some value as a digital storytelling tool for older students as well, I would be hesitant to purchase this app on multiple devices because of the limited audience for which it is intended. It is also fairly limited in it's character options. There aren't many girls, and the option to mix and match characters would be nice. Bottom line: While I'm glad that I have access to this app on one iPad, I would not recommend purchasing it for multiple iPads in a school in which iPads are shared across grade levels.