Hubbard School Library E-News
May 9, 2014
More Life Hacks for the Classroom!
Easy Desk Organizer
Conquer that pile of papers on your desk with a plastic bin, divided into three categories.
No more staples!
Hot glue tacks onto clothespins for an easy way to interchange artwork or anchor charts on a bulletin board.
Art Caddy
A “bucket jockey” found in your local hardware store serves as a portable writing or coloring center.
5 Ways to Create Comics Online
Creating cartoons and comic strips can be a good way to get reluctant writers writing. While creating comics you and your students can work through the elements of fiction in a context that is fun and familiar to them.
Witty Comics provides a simple platform that students can use to create two character dialogues. To use Witty Comics students just need to select the pre-drawn background scenes and the pre-drawn characters they want to feature in their comics. Writing the dialogues is the creative element that is left to the students.
Pixton is a drag-and-drop cartoon creation tool which allows anyone regardless of artistic ability to create comics. Users can join the Pixton community to share their creations with other. In addition to the free individual accounts Pixton offers Pixton for Schools (not free) which allows teachers to create private rooms in which only their students can create and share comics. To learn more about Pixton, watch this short video.
Strip Generator allows anyone, even people who claim they can't draw, to create a good-looking black and white comic strip. To create a comic strip all you need to do is select the number of frames you want then drag characters and objects into those frames. The menus for characters and objects are fairly extensive. Once you've selected a character or object you can adjust the size to fit your scene. Adding text is a simple matter of selecting a speech bubble and typing text. When you're happy with your comic strip you can save it online, print it, or embed it into your blog.
PikiKids provides a variety of layouts to which students can upload images then edit the images or add text bubbles and titles. The comics that students create can be embedded into a blog or website as well as be shared via email. PikiKids is free to use, but it is a for profit website as it offers options for buying tee-shirts or mugs with user-created comics.
Write Comics is a free, simple tool for creating comic strips. Write Comics doesn't require any registration to use. In fact, registration is not even an option. To create a comic on Write Comics just select a background from the menu, choose some characters, and add some speech bubbles. You can continue adding frames until you've completed your story. Write Comics is quite easy to use, but there is one short-coming and that is the only way you can save your work is to save it to your local hard drive.
This and more content can be found at Free Technology for Teachers, by Richard Byrne
Elementary Library News
We are finished with circulation for this school year. Notices went out for any books that have not been returned. Each week, I will continue to update those notices in hopes that most books will be returned before the end of the school year. Thanks for your help with this! I appreciate it!
If you have any questions, please contact Mary Ann Smiley smileym@hubbard.k12.oh.us.
Media Center Resources
Below are links to the Media Center resources.