Comic strips are powerful pedagogical tools that can be used in class for various educational purposes. As I explained in Comic Strips Guide for Teachers, students can use them in their digital storytelling projects to visually retell stories. They can also be used to teach vocabulary, grammar, writing, reading, speaking, and in several other educational activities.
As a teacher, you can engage students in meaningful and hands-on writing activities by getting them to write stories based on pre-made comic strip templates you provide for them. Similarly, you can use comic strips to help students practice new learned vocabulary items or to enhance their speaking and pronunciation skills by giving them the chance to rehearse their comics in front of the whole class.
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| Source: Applied Digital Skills |
There are numerous comic strip making tools you can use to create beautiful comic strips and cartoons. Some of these tools such as Pixton and Canva offer customizable pre-designed comic strip templates to use in your own creation. For those of you looking for a basic and down to earth comic strip making platform, Google Drawings is a good option to consider.
In this lesson from Applied Digital Skills, you and your students will learn how to use Google Drawings (together with Google Docs) to design your own comic strips. You will learn how to create a plan for a story; design characters; how to add shapes, text boxes, callouts, and objects in each frame; and many more.
This video lesson contains the following explanatory short clips: introduction to create a comic strip (5 min), add characters’ words and thoughts (6 min), create a comic strip wrap-up (5 min), plan your story (10 min), set up your drawing (7 min), draw your comic (12 min), and add color to your comic strip (15 min).
By using Google Drawings to create comic strips, students will get to practice the following digital skills: resize and format elements in a drawing, create and format tables, insert tables in a drawing, insert elements such as callouts, shapes and lines in a drawing, and add text to a drawing.
