Interactive Web Comics 4Learning

languages

Learner

Secondary Education

The practice's outcome is to enable scholars and educators working in the field of children's literature and teacher education to use digital versions of picture books or real life case scenarios as a profound method of the creation of interactive comics, while at the same time students will be educated in storytelling techniques. 

Students will initially be inspired by a story presented in a picture book, in articles, a video, or even an educational walk (in which they will be asked to collect photos and videos) and they will use it as a fundamental scenario. Initially they will be asked to create their version of the story scenario. This activity will bring students in dialogue with each other and engage them in creative literary, linguistic and cultural comparative processes.  

Students will create their stories with the use of a web comic book creator tool (ComicLab) which contains libraries of backgrounds and clip arts, while the end user has the ability to also use any type of picture media she wants. This authoring tool will give also the option to incorporate speech balloons with multilingual text, videos or a web link giving the ability to the comic creator to flourish the storyboard with extra multimedia content. 

2015-04-06 05:00:00 - 2015-04-10 13:00:00

Very easy

15 - 20

Students will be able to recall or remember facts, to understand and interpret learned information, to break information into its components to see interrelationships and ideas, to use creativity to compose and design original comic stories

The creation of one or two pages web comic story can be implemented in 45 minutes. If we need to produce an interactive webcomic book we will need a weekly workshop of approximately 4-5 hours daily interaction.

ComicLab is a tool allows the creation of dynamic web comic books developed by Dr. Petros Georgiakakis. An author can create an e-comic book by combining images of characters, pictures, background, text in balloons which can be placed in the frames of the pages of the book in that way and style desired. The produced dynamic web comic books are highly interactive flash based books that provide a great page flipping animation control opportunity as well as features like zooming, printing and easy navigation.

ComicLab is a usable authoring environment. It is a wizzard based platform and basic ICT knowlegde is required.

The only problems we may face during the creation of the intearctive comic story is the lack of backgrounds and cliparts. In this case we either search the web or the students will paint the storyboard and we will scan them and incorporate in ComicLab

ComicLab is a multilingual authoring tool for interactive comic books. With ComicLab you can make up your own interactive multimedia stories with this easy to use comic book creating tool. You can export your comic books as interactive flipping books and/or PDF files.
With ComicLab you can use your imagination and become an author of a comic book. This is the only click-and-drag comic creator that allows you to add hyperlinks, sounds and videos into the text balloons.

Students will be intrigued by a video, a story, an article or even an educational walk. This will be their motivation for creating a comic story scenario. This scenario wil be tranfered in an interactive web comic book.

Samples of best practices can be presented to students:

1. Comic strip competition “Democracy and human rights at school”
2. Web Comic Book Hommer's Iliad from Varvakeios High School
3. Little Prince from Varvakeios High School

Scenarios samples in paper