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With scripts, settings, and characters ready to go, students then begin using Comic Life. In order to appeal to a variety of artistic sensibilities, I invite students to draw by hand, print images from the Internet, or combine both mediums to create a collaged background.

They also draw their characters, which we refer to as “paper dolls” in order to discourage the notion that these characters must look hyper realistic. Once their drafting is complete, I ask students to choose two settings or backgrounds for their scripts, which they draw on paper. After brainstorming potential settings for their scripts (summer camp and college dorms are always favorites), students develop a realistic storyline and spend a few class periods planning out plots and dialogue. After reading several novels as a class, my fifth graders choose one protagonist and write a script in which they imagine what happens to that character after the novel ends. This year I will lead my students through a digital storytelling project for the third time. It was clear I had found a winning concept, as the program allowed me to develop a digital storytelling project that supported and reinforced the foundational writing skills in my curriculum. Indeed, despite this being a digital project, I still spent quite a bit of mental energy on plot development, pacing, tone, organization, and language. My hours spent in Comic Life reminded me that I need not always use pencil and paper (or word processing) in order to encourage my students to improve and refine their writing skills. I based my first Comic Life project on a story I had written earlier and found myself surprised at how many “writing” skills I relied on in order to tell a primarily visual story.

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It was easy to download a free trial of the app to my laptop and even easier to sort through their modular and customizable templates, fonts, captions, and word art.

Blogging and Tweeting were appealing options, but as my students and I had already done quite a bit with those mediums, I put them aside in search of something that would be new to them and me.Īs I thought back to my first year of associate teaching with Monica Edinger, I remembered a project she led in her fourth-grade classroom using Comic Life. I considered developing projects around iMovie, but felt it would be too time consuming to use given the constraints of my English curriculum. I considered video essays, podcasts, digital poems, blogging, and social media, spending hours on false starts as I explored the different tools available. Several years ago, in search of a truly meaningful way to use the tablets and laptops that had become a standard item in my students’ backpacks, I began to research digital storytelling. This post is written by NCTE member Jennifer Kirsch.

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