"How to Use Comic Life in the Classroom"

In the article "How to Use Comic Life in the Classroom," Charles Thacker presents many ways that teachers and students can use comics in the classroom. The article touches on the fact that many in the field of academics see comics as being an inferior mode of literature. However, Thacker goes on to explain that "comics have some great uses in the classroom and in a variety of curricula" (2007).

Thacker gives specific examples of how students at different levels can benefit from the use of comics in the classroom. From the non-reader using comics as a way to "help provide practice with sequencing as well as concrete to abstract transitions using illustrations instead of written words" to the older more advanced student using them as "a stepping-stone to more complex and traditional written work" (Thacker, 2007). One major benefit of the comic is the ability to consolidate a lot of written text into a single comic cell. This can be a great resource for the reluctant or poor reader.

The staff that Thacker works with have been using Comic Life as a means of "facilitat[ing] student participation in assignments that traditionally would have been written assignments with little to no imagery included" (Thacker, 2007). He further explains that they use Comic Life as an alternative assignment to the book report. This gets students much more excited about and involved with the literature. He also includes several other options for the use of Comic Life in the classroom, including "timelines, historical figures, instructions, dialogue punctuation, character [or] plot analysis, storytelling, [and] teaching onomatopoeia" (Thacker, 2007).

The article is concluded with an in-depth explanation of Comic Life and how to create your own comic using the software. He provides the reader with step-by-step instructions on each of the features of Comic Life: the layout, the speech bubbles, the effects, and more. Even though I'd completed my own Comic Life, I learned more on how to use the features within the program. This section of the article makes Comic Life even more user-friendly than it already is.

Thacker, C. (2007, March 8). How to use comic life in the classroom. TechEd: Technology in Education. Retrieved from http://www.macinstruct.com/node/69 on September 25, 2009.