Cartoons & Comics in learning

What’s the difference between what we term “comics,” and the increasingly popular graphic novels? According to this article, “Graphic novels are much longer and tend to be much more complex. While a comic book will tell a story over many issues, graphic novels more often have their storylines wrapped up in only one or two books.” Either way, historically the graphic form has caught a very bad rap. As a school librarian I somewhat frequently deal with the disgruntled parent or guardian who sends their student back to the library with strict instructions--check out a “real” book for a change, or simply “no more graphic novels!” In spite of this, I try to use every opportunity to explain the usefulness of the graphic form, as I previously discussed here--to summarize, they’re great for teaching mood and tone, an excellent choice for English Language Learners, and high interest enough to engage reluctant readers.

Comic strips themselves can also be utilized individually as visual aids in classroom lessons. Several apps and websites can help educators create their own original content, including Pixton, MakeBeliefsComix, and StoryboardThat, which I visited to make the educational examples below.


As suggested by MakeBeliefsComix, I decided to create an autobiographical comic that I would use to introduce myself to students at the beginning of the school year. Likewise it serves as a great example of how they could create this project as well, either as an introduction, or an introduction to autobiography. I liked the user-friendly aspects of this site, however, I found the “character” options a little limited. Additionally, I only created four panels, but a fifth blank panel kept showing up when I attempted to download my work; going back and editing could not remove it. Overall, however, I’d be happy to use this site again, and appreciate the free account.


Next I took the challenge to create a strip that could be used by English Language Learners to fill in and practice conversation skills. I liked this idea because we are always looking for new prompts to use this way. I used Pixton for this example. The first thing I noticed with Pixton is that, depending on your view, a little “locked” symbol appears on many options I wanted to use, meaning the free options are very limited. Stick to basic and you can avoid this frustration, but see fewer options. What’s great about it for ELL: you can change the characters’ expressions. What’s less great: many options are, again, limited with the free account. Finally, I was annoyed with Pixton’s word bubbles, as adding “words” gave me very few choices in appearance, size, etc. Lastly, I ran into some additional problems with this site by mistakenly identifying myself as an educator; I was then unable to retrieve my work, because it wanted me to add students. My recommendation for trying this one is to go to classic and select “I just want to have fun.” Overall, it’s just not as intuitive or user-friendly to me as MakeBeliefsComix.


Finally, I tried storyboardthat.com, which allows free users to create two free storyboards per week. I used this one for a common library lesson, online safety. StoryboardThat is fun and user-friendly, though it doesn’t have all of the pose options offered by MakeBeliefs. However, I thought the speech bubbles were some of the easiest to insert, and it did allow me to download a high-resolution image with a free account, though it does include a distracting watermark. Once again, there is a strong push here to get the paid subscription.

(with watermark)

All of these ideas would ultimately create a fun and brief professional development mini-lesson, or otherwise could be easily shared for classroom integration using a screencast to demonstrate their creation and use.