If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. ~ Charlie Parker
Archive for July, 2009
The last Boolean Squared (for now)
Jul 2nd
I want to do a more comprehensive write-up of my adventures in writing and publishing Boolean Squared, my webcomic about kids, teaching and the classroom. But, this is my final BS comic for the school year and it seems fitting to share it out:
Peace (in the summer),
Kevin
Day in a Sentence on Vacation
Jul 2nd
Hi!
I’ve decided to let Day in a Sentence take a much-needed vacation (which, coincidentally, coincides with my own summer vacation). My plan is to relaunch Day in a Sentence again in August and I hope that many of you who follow the feature will join us again at that moment in time.
As a final call for words, I wondered if you might want to share a sentence about what Day in a Sentence means for you. I often wonder what folks get out of it. For me, Day in a Sentence provides me a reflective moment in the week and the act of narrowing down the essence of the week or day into a single sentence is a wonderful structure. Plus, I love reading what other folks write.
So, what does Day in a Sentence mean to you? Please considering posting your thoughts as a comment here and I will release them as they come in.
Thanks for joining me on the Day in a Sentence adventure.
Peace (with sharing and reflection),
Kevin
Trying out Movie Animation App on iTouch
Jul 1st
My son and I created this on my iTouch with an app called Flipbook. It’s very cool and pretty easy to use. You can then send the video from the mobile device to the Flipbook website, but I wanted to embed it so I moved it over to Flickr.
Peace (in love),
Kevin
Persepolis 2.0, the unofficial remix
Jul 1st
This will probably run right into the Copyright wall, but while it lasts, check out this remix version of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis graphic novels about growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. This remix takes her art and puts the story context into today’s Iran, with its simmering election turmoil. It’s fascinating and you have to wonder if Satrapi will approve or not.
For now, though, take a look and experience another way into modern day Iran at the Persepolis 2.0 website where you can read the remix or download it as a PDF (you may want to do that).
Peace (please),
Kevin
Some odds and ends: How Students Think We Can Use Comics
Jul 1st
I have a few posts here and there that I never got around to publishing before the school year ends and this is one of them. While we were using our closed ToonDoo comic space for Comic Strip Poetry, I asked my students in a survey for some suggestions on how I could integrate the use of comics into various projects throughout the year. I enjoyed reading their suggestions.
On a side note, I also came across this great resource for comics in the classroom (I think it was put together by my friend, Glen) with ComicLife software. Whether you use ComicLife or not, this site has a ton of ideas and possibilities, and includes some great links. Take a look.
And now, my students’ ideas:
- Use it to design Quidditch logo (use shadows and shapes)
- You could make a mystery poem; since there’s black and white slides.
- making a comic book project
- make story books
- make an end of the year book.
- We could do something on how to write a poem, because everyone seems to think that they’re so hard, even though they’re really not (especially if you use an online rhyming dictionary).
- for plays
- Have a writing period where we can show what we have made in ToonDoo.
- Writing digital story books for next year
- Next year you could have an adventure comic rather than an adventure story.
- Science-mitosis
- Social Studies-Egyptians
- We could do a story on how your last year at Norris was.
- We could use it in math and make toons to show how to do a certain equation.
- To make your own wanted posters on toondoo about a criminal.
- We could take any of the prompts we have wrote this year and make then into books. I also think it would be cool to make books about things we a learning to help us remember things.
- I think it would be a good idea to use it in writing class but also maybe in literature class. I think it would be fun to use in literature.
- I think you should do a mystery comic strip poem or on the Harris Burdick story. That would be cool. You should also introduce this site to the younger kids.
- I think we can use this site for many different things for ex. you can probably use this for just an activity after MCAS and create a comic strip of what they thought of MCAS and if they thought it was easy or hard for them and that kind of stuff.
- For songs.
- Maybe we can make multiple strips and put them into a book so after each comic is done, it will be like one giant book.
- We could use it to show our favorite part of Norris School.
- We can use them with the comic book thing to create mini graphic novels and of course more poems and our freewrites in our notebooks.
- We could use them to make stories (a short story writing prompt) into a funny comic that still shows the story.
- I think we could make our own book- maybe a story about how our elementary years at Norris have been.
- I think we could use the toon do site for making a book about our favorite thing that we did in writing.
Peace (in the frames),
Kevin
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