Creating Comics Using Bitstrips for Schools

Date: April 12, 2010

Summary: Have you thought about using comic strips as a new way to engage your students? It seems like a perfect step along the continuum of multimedia use in composition, but the artwork aspect of it may be daunting. Enter: Bitstrips for Schools.

Background

Bitstrips started out in 2008 as a social media website for anyone who wanted to quickly and easily make comic strips without having to draw. It rapidly grew into a highly creative community of dedicated users—many of them, it turned out, educators who use the site as a teaching tool.

That discovery, along with recent studies pointing to comics as an effective way to develop student literacy, led to the creation of Bitstrips for Schools , a site specifically tailored to meet the needs of teachers and students.

Bitstrips for Schools helps take the time and effort out of drawing so that students can focus on writing and composition, and it gives teachers an exciting new medium for teaching their curriculum.

Main Features

• Private and secure virtual classrooms
• Easy-to-use tools that let teachers and students design original characters and create amazing-looking comic strips
• Sharing, remixing, and commenting functions that promote student interaction and collaboration
• Teacher assignment library with hundreds of premade assignments across every grade; teachers can also create their own assignments
• Full teacher control over classrooms, assignments, and student accounts; automatic and manual content filtering

Sign-Up Instructions

For NWP teachers who would like to try Bitstrips for Schools, go to www.bitstripsforschools.com/nwp and complete the form. You'll receive complete access for free from now until August 31, 2010.

Related Resource Topics

• Spotlight on Literacy