Community reviews for Comic Life 3

I LOVE Comic Life, and so do my students! It makes creating a professional-looking product easy and fun. Although the newer versions offer a more robust set of tools, the original ComicLife Deluxe meets my classroom needs just fine.

My students, 2nd-4th graders, love using Comic Life as another publishing tool. It can be used as an assessment tool - let students show you what they've learned about a concept by creating a comic strip. This is another tool to meet those CCLS and allow students to use creativity and critical thinking skills.

In terms of pedagogy, I believe that building a deep understanding vs.a superficial survey of content is dependent on the craft of teaching, and the program you use is just a tool to get you there. Comic Life 3 is no different. If you set students up with a project that has an expectation of deep understanding and higher level thinking, this can be a vehicle to get you there. If you do not set up expectations for applying higher level thinking, they'll play with it just for fun. It's very engaging, so it has the potential to really hit the mark as a tool for creativity in communication.

My students have used this software for 6 years. I teach high school, so for some of them they have been using it since 4th grade. They are experts at it now. Comic Life allows students to express what they have learned in all the different aspects of STEAM in a creative way that makes it fun for them so that they don't mind doing reinforcing work where this works best.

This is a great tool to use in the World Language Classroom. You can take any vocab or grammar set and ask your students to create a conversation - putting the grammar and vocab into a real life situation. I find that many of my students enjoy reading graphic novels and they enjoy in turn creating their own. Great tool!

I used Comic Life with a group of fourth grade English learners as an extension of traditional narrative writing. It was already loaded on our Mac laptops, so I am unaware of the cost. Now that I no longer have it, I see how much more flexibility it offered in creativity. Comic Life allows students to create a story using templates and insert images from the web or their own files. The latter is how we used it after drawing our own comics, we uploaded the jpg files and merely dropped and dragged to the panel of their choice. I have found that other software is limited to pre-made animation choices. Some students like creating their own drawings, particularly fans of manga and want to create a story around their original work. It is precisely this feature (the use of student generated images, either from camera phones, digital cameras or the web) that distinguishes this program from others that I use. I have also used this program with fifth grade students in science to illustrate conceptual understanding in a non-linguistic form. This is helpful for struggling writers and students who prefer visual demonstration of what they have learned.