Comic Books now with a little added Aurasma

               

Our latest project is a cool one.  I am lucky enough to welcome the literary skills of some of my students.  Without giving anything away, they will give you an overview of our latest project and a little first hand insight into the learning that took place in our classroom.  A heads up, each paragraph is written by a different student.

In class we have been learning about Moral Choices and Pathways.  In short, we have been looking at how we encounter moral choices in our life.  At our school we are 'buddies' to the students in prep. (Prep is kindergarten in other countries).  We decided as a class we would create books for our buddies that address a moral choice or dilemma.  To make this assignment even more interesting, we decided we would make comic strips for our buddies; not just any old book.

We started this project in the last week of February.  If your classroom is anything like ours, time seemed to get away from us, but finally our masterpieces are complete! In class we identified moral choices, moral dilemmas and investigated real life examples of these, including examples that we (age 10-11) have experienced in our short lives.  Once we had done this we broke in groups of 2-3 and started to work on a framework for our comic strips.

We chose our characters and our events.  We had already had talks about the type of characters we would need to use to make sure our audience (our prep buddies) relate to our comics.  Some of us created our own characters by using everyday items.  (MR. Stop was created from looking at a STOP sign) and some of us used characters that are well known to us like the Red Angry Bird or Little Miss Sunshine.

After we had our characters all sorted, we worked on planning the main events in our comics.  We made sure that our characters worked with the events we had chosen.  We talked with the other groups and made sure that our comics weren't too similar to each other and began to storyboard our comic.

After our storyboards were complete we began to colour and finalise each frame.  we used an app on the iPad called ComicBook!  We created our comics by taking photos of the frames we had completed.  We then input the text for our comics.  To be honest, this was sometimes hard.  We had to work hard to make sure the text fit into each frame but at the same time it had to make sense to our audiences and allow our stories to flow.  As I said, we used the class iPad but if we had an iPod touch/iPad of our own, we were allowed to bring them in to assist us with our comics.

It was the first time I had ever been part of a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) event anywhere. It was fun to see the whole class working together with different devices to achieve our goal of making awesome comics.  We learnt lots of skills and because we were able to use our own device we can do it again.  Usually we're not allowed our own devices at school, this was different, it was fun.  It was personal too which was cool and then when my parents asked what we were doing I was able to show them.  I secretly think mum and dad enjoyed making a comic more than I did.

After some trial and error, we all managed to add our text and make our stories flow well.  We published our comics as a jpeg file and printed them A3 size to share with our buddies. Mr hull always tell us that reflection is a major part of learning.  We decided it would be cool to record videos of our reflections and use the app AURASMA to embed/overlay our reflections onto our comic strips.  

Making Auras on the Aurasma app was awesome.  We learnt how to use our devices to record our videos and then import them to the Aurasma app.  We learnt all about appropriate lighting, sound, camera angles etc.  Even though our videos aren't Hollywood quality, we think they're great and a lot of time went into the 60 seconds of fame we recorded.  It took us a long time, but it was great to work as a whole class, helping each other make sure we got our videos recorded.

We learnt how to publish our Auras and then created QR Codes so anyone could see our reflections on our Comic Books.  We put these next to the tiles of our comics and with a QR Code reader it sorts out all the background stuff.  It downloads Aurasma if it isn't on your device and then readies the Aura for you to watch.  It's simple really.

Finally, we were given ask assessment sheet by Mr Hull.  We also had to complete a written reflection.  After we had done this, we put them on the assessment sheet as well as a picture of our comic.  We suggested that we add the QR Code for our Aura so that when the Assessment task goes into our portfolio, no matter where we go or whoever is looking through the folio, they will be able to simply point their device at the assessment task and WHAM! there's our reflection. 

Below you can see our completed comic strips.  We ask that you view and share our creations with respect and we hope you enjoy them as much as we enjoyed making them.  Two of the Comic strips have QR Codes next to them, if you scan them you will be able to view the reflections for that comic.

Mr Bird Learns to Share
A Comic about sharing.

King Pig the Big Bully
A Comic about learning to say sorry.

Mr Stop says sorry
A Comic about learning to apologise.

The Two Brothers
A Comic about sharing and saying sorry.

Mr Pig's Big Choice
A Comic about saying sorry for poorly chosen actions.

Mr Storm's bad day
A Comic about speaking to please and not to tease.

Grumpy Unicorn's Grumpy Day
A Comic about treating people how you would like to be treated.

Blobby and Stick
A Comic about friendship and apologies.

The Case of the Stolen Eggs
A Comic about apologising for wrong doings.

Mr Grumpy and the New Kite
A Comic about stealing and returning.

The Seaside Name Calling
A Comic about teasing and forgiveness.

Super Orange and the Red Cape
A Comic about knowing when to apologise

Little miss Sunshine's New Toy
A Comic about jealousy and forgiveness.

Mr Yellow's New Balloon
A Comic about saying sorry when you have hurt another.