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I took part in an animation webinar recently. The girl, sadly I can't remember her name, mentioned that she really should be starting her projects by creating a storyboard, for example on Storyboardthat. I heard the name but I had no idea what she's taking about so I Googled it .... and this is how I fell in love with storyboardthat.com
Storyboard that is website which lets you create storyboards and comic strips. It's got loads of attractive graphics and an option of uploading your own pictures. It's really easy to use, it literally took me 10 minutes to work it out. It took even less time for my students to work it out. To show you just a couple of option available I took a short video of my computer screen. See for yourselves how brilliant it is:
From the moment I saw it and saw how easy it was to use, I knew I had to use it with my kids!! đ You know how in many course books there are certain dialogues introducing language functions that the kids need to study? Usually when I ask my students to write a dialogue they are apprehensive. When I asked them to turn the dialogue into a comic they couldn't get enough of it!! đđđ I'll show you two of my favourites.
I like this one, by Antosia, because of the work that went into all the details:
I like this one, by Orest, because of the comic effect đ
There's more to love, though! There's an option of creating a teacher account (you need to pay for that) and assigning students to different classes!! With students younger than 13 we can make an account for them without using any of the kids' personal data.
I have access to all of my students accounts. This means that when I ask them to create a comic I can check at any time where they are with their assignment. I can also download their work in different formats and make notes on it to let them know what needs to be corrected. I can even edit their work if I want to.
I'm absolutely loving this website. My plan for the next school year is to get rid of the course book from my lessons. Thanks to this website my students can prepare materials which not only work for them now but also ones I'll be able to use next year with another group.
To make sure the kids know what's happening in the dialogues (the kids reading them next year or simply for the first time) we are going to put the translation of the phrases into the comic, like here:
The font is very light on purpose so that it doesn't take over the comic đ
Oh but the fun doesn't end here! The comic strips created by the kids have sound recorded onto them! đ We did that using my favourite discovery from two years ago: PENpal by Mantra Lingua. For those of you who don't know, Penpal is a recording device shaped like a very thick pen. It records on special tiny stickers which can be attached to literally anything. You record the sound simply by touching the sticker with the device and talking into it like a microphone. Once you're done recording and you touch the sticker with Penpal again it will play back what was recorded. It's BRILLIANT!!! The children recorded the sound themselves đ
And this is the final product: a lovely foldable talking booklet made 100% by my students:
Have fun creating,
Ewa :)