Writing practice that is NOT boring!!

Personally, there would have to be a specific lesson plan in order to incorporate this site into standard teaching. I like that the website is inclusive to students who speak other languages and those with special needs. Also, the directions were easy to follow, and provides a variety of options to choose from.

Overall, I highly recommend this tool despite drawbacks outlined below because it's easy to learn and use for even those who are not tech savvy. The directions on the site are quite clear. It's a great teaching tool because it doesn't take a lot of time to teach it. I spent about 20 minutes going over the tool with the class, and clarifying expectations for responsible use of technology before releasing them to work independently because I find that is time well-spent with the younger students. It reminds them that when we are at school, we refrain from rabbit-hole searches and endless playing around with all the options on a platform. Usually I give them about 10-15 minutes of exploration time when they are introduced to a new program. I gave them another 20 minute with this so my actual introduction to the product was 40 minutes, but then after that they were responsible and on-task. With older students, I expect one could hold them to educational constraints with far less prep time, and I could have introduced my class to this and had it up and running in 5 minutes, but felt the groundwork was time well spent. Students intuitively knew how to manipulate the frames, resize objects, characters and bubbles, and change backgrounds. If that had not been the case, the directions were clear and right in front of them. I have found that it is usually only the teachers that need to read the directions with this site! There are several features that would make this product more flexible and usable in the classroom. First, it would be great to have the ability to insert a background of choice. When my students are writing about what they see, think and wonder in relation to a piece of art, it would be valuable to be able to insert the image in the background. Another feature that would make this tool more practical in the classroom would be the ability for students to save their comics to individual portfolios. My students have their own gmail accounts, but there are still several steps to labeling the emails they send themselves with the comics and then later snipping out the images into a separate document for printing and display as part of a larger body of work. Finally, while a strength of comics is brevity, it would be nice to have the option to insert more text by either enlarging a bubble or shrinking the font. It confuses young writers to have to remove several words due to space constraints when they've worked hard to craft a masterful sentence.

It can be used in a wide variety of ways, and fits easily into the English classroom as either pre-writing or post-reading. The only issue is a lack of being able to save to work, which is an issue if a student accidently presses the arrow back (thinking it is "undo"), they lose all their work! However, the fact my students don't have to register for the website more than makes up for it! Be aware it does use Flash so it will not work on iPads.