Assignment 3: Comics, Cartoon, and Graphic Novels.
Well...
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The Lesson: Digital Citizenship - An Introduction for 3rd Grade Students
Third graders will have a unit on Digital Citizenship. This lesson serves as the introduction to that unit. The purpose of the introduction is to remind students of the types of issues that they may face in using digital tools and how they should react. The comic I created will be used as the hook in this lesson - a starting point for small and whole group sharing. Students will work in small groups to create additional pages for the “Well…” story I started. In a subsequent lesson, they will choose one scenario per group to add to my story using the online comic creator, MakeBeliefsComix.com. Not having to have an account coupled with the ability to email a finished product to me makes this application perfect for younger students. My lesson strategy stemmed from Gagne’s Model of Instructional Design and his nine steps. Each is defined within my lesson below.
1. Gaining attention: The hook is the comic I have created to begin my introductory lesson on digital citizenship.
2. Informing the Learner of the Objectives: Through whole-group discussion after viewing the comic strip, students will understand their goal for the lesson: to brainstorm within their small groups additional snags that may come their way in navigating the internet and digital tools. In addition, they will be encouraged to note positive internet experiences as well.
3. Stimulating recall of prior learning: Students will draw on character education knowledge to relate to issues we may encounter in the digital world.
4. Presenting the stimulus: The comic presented to students portrays the complexities of digital citizenship as a relatable topic. Seeing friendly characters encountering real world challenges will encourage students to place themselves into these and other imaginary scenarios requiring a character-based skillset to make good decisions.
5. Providing learning guidance: When working in their small groups, students ideas will feed off each other. Likely the first idea expressed will not be the chosen one. Rather, it will be a compilation of ideas that stemmed from different students, all learning together.
6. Eliciting performance: Students create their own creative, informative digital citizenship vignettes.
7. Providing feedback: Student groups will choose 3 of their brainstormed digital citizenship scenarios for me to read. I will provide verbal feedback on the spot leading students to either change the content of a slide, extend the idea, or my reasoning for why it’s not an appropriate entry to our story.
8. Assessing performance: Students will tweak their scenarios based on my and peers’ feedback.
9. Enhancing retention and transfer: Students will show their favorite scenarios to other student groups explaining what they had to “tweak” after their first attempts.
I know that my students respond positively to graphic novels. In the first 3 days of book checkout, all 42 copies of various books in the series Diary of a Wimpy Kid were checked out. To the point that it is common knowledge, research has proven that graphic novels are a boon to reluctant readers. However, the same is true for the other end of the spectrum. There is no doubt that Frey and Fisher (2008) are correct when they say “This [graphic novel] multi-sensory activity stirs the imaginations of more advanced readers and challenges them to use their higher-level thinking, reading and writing skills” (p. 34).
Several multimedia principles and elements of visual/media literacy were considered in the making of my digital citizenship comic strip entitled, “Well…” First, the segmenting principle suggests that complex topics be broken down into small pieces (Clark & Mayer, 2011). A comic is ideal for visual breakage since each frame focuses attention on, in my case, one component of the larger topic. I also tried to respect Clark and Mayer's (2011) second coherence principle staying away from excessive, distracting, purposeless graphics. For example, the first frame of my comic takes place in a different room from the remaining frames. But, rather than use one of MakeBeliefComix.com’s drawn backgrounds distracting the reader from the content of each frame, I used a solid color background and a simple clip art computer as a reminder that the two characters are on the internet. And finally, the multimedia principle of design emphasizes the importance of having both graphics and words, not just words. A comic certainly accomplishes that. In Well…, I made every effort to attach the text to the graphic and make it clear that the conversation went from left to right. It was tempting to move the characters around in various frames. However, doing so in such a cramped environment would have made tracking the conversation very difficult.
I’ve found that of the three terms comics, cartoons, and graphic novels, young children relate best to graphic novels. When I introduce graphic novels as a genre, I show them a comic strip from the newspaper, a comic book, and a graphic novel. They understand the concept of cartoon without much explanation. I refer to the oldies like Bugs Bunny and they immediately start naming numerous other examples from classics to newer ones that are unfamiliar to me. So that’s my understanding of the distinction among the three types of multimedia in question. Comics refer to comic strips such as those in the newspaper or books dedicated to specific comic strip characters. Cartoons refer to video characters. And graphic novels refer to books that are largely told through illustration augmented with text, sometimes even a page or so of text at a time. The correct presentation and balance of images and text has to ability to captivate and engage all levels of readers.
I’ve never created my own comic strip, so this was a challenge! And the application I finally ended up with, MakeBeliefComix.com, was not without its own challenges. For example, there is little flexibility beyond their choice of elements. I chose this platform because I was able to choose 2 characters with 2 or more different expressions that loosely matched the emotion my story is trying to convey. Taking my own pictures and editing them to work within my story was simply beyond the scope of this assignment, and certainly not something I could expect students to do. Therefore, I dealt with space limitations - only one of the largest size speech bubble would fit in a screen so editing my script to trim as many words became a common practice. Getting the arrow on the speech bubble to match the character was sometimes nearly impossible. But all in all, I am happy with my product and my lesson ideas. And I know students will be, too.
References
Clark, R. C., & Mayer, R. E. (2011). E-learning and the science of instruction: Proven guidelines for consumers and designers of multimedia learning. San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer.
Frey, N., & Fisher, D. (2008). Teaching visual literacy: Using comic books, graphic novels, anime, cartoons, and more to develop comprehension and thinking skills. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
Third graders will have a unit on Digital Citizenship. This lesson serves as the introduction to that unit. The purpose of the introduction is to remind students of the types of issues that they may face in using digital tools and how they should react. The comic I created will be used as the hook in this lesson - a starting point for small and whole group sharing. Students will work in small groups to create additional pages for the “Well…” story I started. In a subsequent lesson, they will choose one scenario per group to add to my story using the online comic creator, MakeBeliefsComix.com. Not having to have an account coupled with the ability to email a finished product to me makes this application perfect for younger students. My lesson strategy stemmed from Gagne’s Model of Instructional Design and his nine steps. Each is defined within my lesson below.
1. Gaining attention: The hook is the comic I have created to begin my introductory lesson on digital citizenship.
2. Informing the Learner of the Objectives: Through whole-group discussion after viewing the comic strip, students will understand their goal for the lesson: to brainstorm within their small groups additional snags that may come their way in navigating the internet and digital tools. In addition, they will be encouraged to note positive internet experiences as well.
3. Stimulating recall of prior learning: Students will draw on character education knowledge to relate to issues we may encounter in the digital world.
4. Presenting the stimulus: The comic presented to students portrays the complexities of digital citizenship as a relatable topic. Seeing friendly characters encountering real world challenges will encourage students to place themselves into these and other imaginary scenarios requiring a character-based skillset to make good decisions.
5. Providing learning guidance: When working in their small groups, students ideas will feed off each other. Likely the first idea expressed will not be the chosen one. Rather, it will be a compilation of ideas that stemmed from different students, all learning together.
6. Eliciting performance: Students create their own creative, informative digital citizenship vignettes.
7. Providing feedback: Student groups will choose 3 of their brainstormed digital citizenship scenarios for me to read. I will provide verbal feedback on the spot leading students to either change the content of a slide, extend the idea, or my reasoning for why it’s not an appropriate entry to our story.
8. Assessing performance: Students will tweak their scenarios based on my and peers’ feedback.
9. Enhancing retention and transfer: Students will show their favorite scenarios to other student groups explaining what they had to “tweak” after their first attempts.
I know that my students respond positively to graphic novels. In the first 3 days of book checkout, all 42 copies of various books in the series Diary of a Wimpy Kid were checked out. To the point that it is common knowledge, research has proven that graphic novels are a boon to reluctant readers. However, the same is true for the other end of the spectrum. There is no doubt that Frey and Fisher (2008) are correct when they say “This [graphic novel] multi-sensory activity stirs the imaginations of more advanced readers and challenges them to use their higher-level thinking, reading and writing skills” (p. 34).
Several multimedia principles and elements of visual/media literacy were considered in the making of my digital citizenship comic strip entitled, “Well…” First, the segmenting principle suggests that complex topics be broken down into small pieces (Clark & Mayer, 2011). A comic is ideal for visual breakage since each frame focuses attention on, in my case, one component of the larger topic. I also tried to respect Clark and Mayer's (2011) second coherence principle staying away from excessive, distracting, purposeless graphics. For example, the first frame of my comic takes place in a different room from the remaining frames. But, rather than use one of MakeBeliefComix.com’s drawn backgrounds distracting the reader from the content of each frame, I used a solid color background and a simple clip art computer as a reminder that the two characters are on the internet. And finally, the multimedia principle of design emphasizes the importance of having both graphics and words, not just words. A comic certainly accomplishes that. In Well…, I made every effort to attach the text to the graphic and make it clear that the conversation went from left to right. It was tempting to move the characters around in various frames. However, doing so in such a cramped environment would have made tracking the conversation very difficult.
I’ve found that of the three terms comics, cartoons, and graphic novels, young children relate best to graphic novels. When I introduce graphic novels as a genre, I show them a comic strip from the newspaper, a comic book, and a graphic novel. They understand the concept of cartoon without much explanation. I refer to the oldies like Bugs Bunny and they immediately start naming numerous other examples from classics to newer ones that are unfamiliar to me. So that’s my understanding of the distinction among the three types of multimedia in question. Comics refer to comic strips such as those in the newspaper or books dedicated to specific comic strip characters. Cartoons refer to video characters. And graphic novels refer to books that are largely told through illustration augmented with text, sometimes even a page or so of text at a time. The correct presentation and balance of images and text has to ability to captivate and engage all levels of readers.
I’ve never created my own comic strip, so this was a challenge! And the application I finally ended up with, MakeBeliefComix.com, was not without its own challenges. For example, there is little flexibility beyond their choice of elements. I chose this platform because I was able to choose 2 characters with 2 or more different expressions that loosely matched the emotion my story is trying to convey. Taking my own pictures and editing them to work within my story was simply beyond the scope of this assignment, and certainly not something I could expect students to do. Therefore, I dealt with space limitations - only one of the largest size speech bubble would fit in a screen so editing my script to trim as many words became a common practice. Getting the arrow on the speech bubble to match the character was sometimes nearly impossible. But all in all, I am happy with my product and my lesson ideas. And I know students will be, too.
References
Clark, R. C., & Mayer, R. E. (2011). E-learning and the science of instruction: Proven guidelines for consumers and designers of multimedia learning. San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer.
Frey, N., & Fisher, D. (2008). Teaching visual literacy: Using comic books, graphic novels, anime, cartoons, and more to develop comprehension and thinking skills. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.