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/
