Comic+Life



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Using this page and the links off it, it should take about an hour to produce you first graphic story using this program. It will help if you have an idea and images available to use before you start.
 * Introduction**

An audio introduction is here: media type="file" key="ComicLiffeIntro.mp3" width="240" height="20"
This was the only commercial product introduced in the course on which this wiki is based, and licenses are available for educational use at euro 14.95 on this web page: [|Comic Life Educational Sales] This software provides a series of comic style templates with lettering tools which allow you to create comic strips with your own images for content. You can use this to convert a series of images into a comic book, add captions and headings and play around with different formats and layouts. Apart from art and communications where the students can produce work either as individuals or group work, I think the following examples show how it can be used to increase student engagement. A social and health education class used comics built by the students to explore issues such as bullying, peer pressure, and criminality. A class for school age mothers developed their understanding of health education materials by generating comic strips describing the issues from templates, which they were then allowed to print out in color. Because being allowed to print in color was not the norm for budgetary reasons, the students were proud of their work and laminated them to take home. In this way the students ended up taking home advice sheets which were much more likely to be retained than might otherwise be the case. More formally the Comic Life web site lists the following benefits of Comic creation in education which came from the research of Janette Combs
 * What is is it?**
 * Educational use.**

- A great visual Representation of Knowledge - Presents what is essential - Easier to remember a visual graphic containing key information - Engaging through thinking, creating and writing. - Perfect avenue for writing dialogue - Incites students with low interest in writing - Helps organization through storytelling and story boarding - Using visual images convey meaning to a story or topic - Develops creative and higher level thought processes - Develops composition techniques through visual-verbal connections - Enriches reading, writing, and thinking - Serves as and assessment and evaluation tool - Sequencing promotes understanding

This list which is widely available on the we apparently derives from the following "Creating Comics: Visual and Verbal Thinking in the Ultimate Show and Tell" by Janette Combs, College of William and Mary, July 17, 2003., although I have been unsuccessful in locating the original document.

There is a good tutorial on using the MAC version of the program here: [|Link to Tutorial] URL http://www.macinstruct.com/node/69 The tutorial is also applicable to a PC platform (that’s what we used in Malta) and there are further references at the end of that article. A more extensive WIKI with a lot more examples is here: http://comic-life.wikispaces.com/Schools This is where to go next. If you have any further questions, you may contact me via this online discussion, set up for this Wiki. [|Eleven Tools Comic Life forum]
 * Further reading:**