The "New Teacher" Blog
Creating Comic Strips
Digital online comic creation tools offer a vast majority of possibilities for foreign language teaching. Teachers as well as pupils can create comic strips that can be used for various curricular fields like grammar, picture descriptions and others. The comic on the worksheet seen on the left was designed with the online tool bitstrips.com which provides a fairly easy way of composing a graphic illustration. On the picture below you can see the control panel that guides the user through the creation process. When starting off the user can choose between a number of backgrounds such as beaches, a classroom, inner city scenes or a restaurant in which characters can be introduced. There are a lot of possibilities to manipulate the characters in their stance, size or facial features. The handling of the program is easy to learn making it applicable for school use.
The use of images to to teach pupils how to express the position of people or elements in relation to others is elementary. The fact that the pupils have access to a graphic realization of the people and objects named in the task enhances the learning process. In addition to that the pictures have a motivating function as they brush up the worksheet and invite the recipient to work. One benefit of working with bitstrips.com is that new and spontaneous scenes can be generated so that the teacher is not restricted to old, outdated textbook illustrations.
The use of images to to teach pupils how to express the position of people or elements in relation to others is elementary. The fact that the pupils have access to a graphic realization of the people and objects named in the task enhances the learning process. In addition to that the pictures have a motivating function as they brush up the worksheet and invite the recipient to work. One benefit of working with bitstrips.com is that new and spontaneous scenes can be generated so that the teacher is not restricted to old, outdated textbook illustrations.
