ComicLife - Everyone's Talking About It

I had never heard of ComicLife before beginning our recent project. However, I laughed out loud at some of the examples I saw, and I was hooked pretty quickly. I struggled to come up with a media center-related application, but then I looked at more examples and noticed one that detailed a particular procedure. That’s when I got the idea of doing a very basic “how-to” guide for using our cataloging application, Destiny. I have a program on my work computers called FullShot, which allows you to do screen shots and make them into jpg files. So, I wrote an outline of what I was going to do, created the screen shots, and then enlisted my parapro’s daughter to be my representative student. She did a great job! I originally did a pretty simple version, but then realized I could open the jpg files in Paint, and create some arrows and other features that would call the user’s attention to certain places on the picture. So I basically re-created it, but I think it was worth it in the end.

I liked ComicLife and found it fairly simple to use. But, I struggled with some of the functionality. For instance, I found I had to click at one certain place on the image in order to rotate, another to make it bigger, and still another to move it completely. When the image is small, this isn’t easy to do. I was forever rotating the picture inadvertently, and then having to undo my changes. In addition, even after using the Help feature, I had some difficulty with the Style feature. Overall however, it was pretty intuitive and I could have created a simple ComicLife project without having to use the Help feature at all.

There are so many uses for ComicLife in the classroom. Just in language arts alone, students can easily create stories either using photos or pictures they’ve drawn and scanned in. In social studies, students can present research on places or other cultures by using images and creating captions. In science and math, students or teachers can develop a graphical step-by-step procedure for solving problems. The fact that ComicLife costs money may present some limitations to using it – in my county, any application that we want on our server has to go through a lengthy approval process. But, I can see purchasing it to go on the local drives of a handful of easily accessible computers so that those teachers interested in using it would have a way to do so.