Sunday, February 17, 2008

Comiqs: An Online Comic Book Creator


Being a PC user, I have been somewhat jealous of some of the tools that Apple users have at their disposal, one of them was ComicLife, a tool to create comic book pages. I had been looking for a PC version and found one in Comic Book Creator and I purchased several copies for the lab computers at Capuchino High School. Now, there is an online alternative. Comiqs, is a tool that allows you to upload pictures or other images and add 'thought bubble' and other types of text to the images. I have always liked having students use comic book or cartoons to show cause and effect relationships and to illustrate complex ideas into a step by step process. I also like the fact that it allows students who may not be 'wordsmiths' an opportunity to shine using another medium to demonstrate that they have synthesized the material covered in class.

While I think the original intent of the application was purely recreational, I do think there are some definite educational applications. I will be adding this into the presentations I am doing with Picasa and Guerrilla Learning. Check out the demo below from YouTube.


2 comments:

Karen Janowski said...

Thanks for the link - I explored it further because it looks like an excellent application for many students with whom I work. Wish there was some way to disable the photo library that is built in - one of the first ones that I came to was two bears mating - not necessarily appropriate for younger students. Not sure what else is included. I'd rather just use photos that I set up for students.
Otherwise, I love the ease and flexibility. I often recommend creating comics in Word with thought bubbles - this is so much easier.

Kyle Brumbaugh said...

Seems that the pics that are in the photo library change... I did go back and looked and could not find the photo of the bears. I will definitely drop a note to the owners to the site regarding school appropriate content in the default library.

Thanks for the comment!

KB