4.1. Create a comic to represent emotions

Comics! Such a fun and engaging way to learn! Today I will show a tool to create comics to use in your classroom. 

First of all, I would like to show you what I did. In my case I wanted to use my comics to teach emotions through History. First, you can see the comic that introduces the main characters, Josh and Sam, and their story: they stumble upon a magic book that takes them to different events in History to learn about emotions. In the second comic, you can see one of the chapters, which is about the Black Plague in the 14th century.

The idea behind this type of comic is that they can be created for each topic of Social Sciences, linking it with emotional intelligence, interrelating them in a natural way and leading to interesting debates between students. It will allow pupils to compare their own period of time with others and seeing how similar situations prompt the same emotions, seeing that even if it happened many years ago it still has relevance. In the case of this example, the comic is set in a pandemic, like the one we are living.  
Made with Storyboard That

Critical questions and problems encountered:

At first, I was a bit lost on which app to use. I tried Pixton, but to use most of the features you have to pay! I decided to switch and started from scratch with StoryboardThat. 

It is very intuitive. However, I had to look for help from my peers to find how to increase the number of cells (the option is at the bottom of the screen). 

When having to embed it, I had to carefully look for the option, as it is at the bottom and in a very tiny font. When pasting it into Blogger, I had to change its size, as it was too big for my blog template.

A problem that I encountered is that the free version only allows for two comics per week. You can solve it by creating an extra account if you are in a rush for a quick comic. 

Discoveries

This resource as a whole was a discovery for me! I hadn't heard of it before. 

One thing that I discovered while working with it is that you can copy whole cells, but I found out when I was almost done. Better late than never, I guess! (the option is on the bottom right corner, by the way)

The free version has a lot of content, like characters from different historical period, scenes, items, speech bubbles, etc. This tool allows for a lot of personalisation in terms of colour: skin, hair, clothes, walls, floor, furniture... Moreover, it has an option to change the time of the day and some features on the scenes. It even has thousands of fonts for the speech bubbles!

Uses or connections

This is an amazing tool for teaching any kind of topic, as it has a lot of scenes, characters and even science-related items. Going one step ahead, you can even ask your students to create comics of a certain topic to see if they understood, to work the features of a comic in Spanish Language or just for fun!

Martyrating

🌙🌙🌙🌙🌙

Pros: 

• The free version contains a lot of items, which are varied.
• Easy to use and intuitive

Cons: 

• To make bigger comics you have to pay.
• Only two comics per week.
• You need to create an account to save your comics, even as an image.

That was it for today, Have a nice day!