As I started looking through the various Web 2.0 tools, a site called ToonDoo caught my eye and so I decided to look a little more closely at this tool. Earlier in the program, we were given a subscription to ComicLife and asked to create a comic book. I really enjoyed this assignment and knew right away that my students would love interacting with these comics. Therefore, I decided to create my own book as a review for my students. This week is currently reading week at my school with a superhero theme and so I created this comic book to integrate and to give the students a unique way to review for the upcoming test. Here are a few pages from my fifteen page comic book reviewing the concepts of rhythm, pulse, and meter.
The students, although maybe not with words, were really appreciative of the work that this took to create. The students were excited to read the story, while I was excited to see them engaged in the curriculum. It has been a win-win!
I created my own superheroes (SuperPulse and his sidekick Beat, among others) which pushed me to be a little more creative than I normally would be had it not been for ComicLife. Further, my wife teaches music at another elementary school nearby where we live and she was sharing this book with a few of the teachers and the principal was so impressed that she wanted her own copy of the book.
I share the above for a few reasons. I have been really impressed by how the students have responded to this comic book. Therefore, I wanted to explore another tool that allowed me to do the same, perhaps it a different way. The tool I selected was ToonDoo. This tool, that also allows you to create comics, shares a lot in common with ComicLife, but also has some more to offer. ToonDoo has a free membership that allows you to create these comics that has clip art already accessible, including backgrounds, characters, bubbles, etc.
This tool is extremely user friendly and would be useful for teachers and students alike. It took me just a few seconds to create the two slides below and was as simply as drag and drop.
For me, I will continue to use this to review concepts of music, but may also use this in connection with my action research project about response-to-intervention and the multiple intelligences. I could use the comics I create to help the struggling readers I will be working with and to help them to be interested in what they are reading.
Here is a link for you to get started creating your own comic in ToonDoo: http://www.toondoo.com/
Brett, The correlation you made between ComicLife and Toondoo along with your discussion of Toondoo, made me immediately go to the site to check it out. I think even high school students would get a kick out creating comics or reading comics created in Toondoo. I am always looking for fun engaging activities for my students to use in class, and Toondoo definitely fits the bill. Thanks for sharing. Also, I love the comic you made in ComicLife, what program did you use to make the characters?
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment. To answer your question, I bought a one week subscription to clipart.com and was able to download more clip art than I ever needed to complete several comic books. I'm sure you could probably create the characters with some of the software we have, but this was the quick solution at the time.
ReplyDeleteBrett,
ReplyDeleteRena Hanaway gave me your blog info, as I am an elementary music teacher as well, and an EMDT alumni and mentor.
I really like your comic book idea! I made a series of unit intros for my students using Go!Animate, which they loved! I would love to share ideas with you and learn more about your AR project. If you are interested, Rena can give you my contact info, or you can look me up on the mentor website! :)
Brett,
ReplyDeleteI used Comic Life for a presentation I did with my students earlier this year and they loved it. I found that I was frustrated because the students wanted to create their own comics, but the computers in my building did not have the program. In the past I have had my students create comics as a part of a project, but this tended to be more of a headache than it was worth. Some students couldn't draw and others had difficulty figuring out how to organize their comic. Overall, they would get frustrated and just go through the motions to get the assignment done and turned in. I liked this tool for many reasons. One, it's free. It does not require any programming to be downloaded, so I would be able to have my students set up accounts and dig in to creating their own comics. Two, the drag and drop formatting was very easy to use. Three, the ready-made templates made the program very accessible to everyone. I always thought that cartoon/comic programs would be too difficult to use in the classroom, but this program is actually quite simple. I also like that the program allows the work to be posted, embed, and printed (basic comic only) free of charge. This is definitely a program that I will be using with my students this year.
Brett,
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading comics as a kid growing up so I know the value that comics can play on some of the students. Especially with the japanese brand of novel style "Manga" books, there is a lot to read and to comprehend in the merging of imagery and text to develop a greater meaning.
Teaching a music performance class myself, I'm compromised with the idea that even though I teach in the block which affords me a lot of time, I'm still forced to stick to rehearsing music and not getting caught up in side projects that help inform students about musical content but ultimately take away from the important rehearsal time.
For my purposes, I enjoy doing presentations that offer some kind of interactivity which leads me to my second compromise in that I'm in need of laptops for the band room. If every student had a ipad like device built into their music stands, that would be a dream come true to have students making use of a resource they've already been using for generations.
Toondoo seems to be a fun way to present information to a younger audience that would be much more receptive to the content then other less visual conventions. I will be looking into this program myself later in the year.