Use Comic Strip Generator in the Classroom

Creating a comic strip gives the student great opportunity to work with creativity in a format of free writing. Except of thinking and writing, such activity also involves reading – student write their own comics and read others’ comics. Therefore, incorporate creating comic strips into classroom is a comprehensive practice for the students to plot and compose the stories and to understand other’s stories. With online tool like Storybird and Stripe Generator, where students can find hundreds and thousands of comic images to make their stories, students are able to access more resource and be more inspired to write interesting stories. They are also able to give feedback to their peers and get feedback from teachers and classmate. Since the products of a comic stripe will be more or less related to writing, how clear the students’ writings are should be taken into consideration. The followings are how I would assess their comic stories:

• The clarity of the writing;
• Grammar accuracy will be focused on the understandability;
•  Relevancy of the images to the texts and to the story;
•  How interesting your classmate rate for your story;

While creating my own comic strip in Storybird, I found myself not as creative as I expected myself to be, so I would put pressure on my students that their stories have to be funny, creative and impressive. They can start with a comic with clear story line, even if it is very simply. Nevertheless, I would not expect them to be grammatical error free in their comic stripes as long as there won’t be confusion for the readers caused by grammar errors. What the peer evaluation would also matter because students can get a sense of what a good story can be like and what a not so good story should be avoid through reading others’ stories. I am not saying that we can’t use comic stripes to improve students’ grammar accuracy, but I, personally, will use it to encourage and motivate students to think and to write, as well as enjoy and evaluate their peers’ stories.