Kapow Bam Boom… Adding Comics to the Classroom

Today’s students find themselves on Snapchat, Instagram, and other social media platforms for communication. One of the fun features is to create stickers and avatars to depict your thoughts.

A while ago, Matt Miller of Ditch That Textbook shared a wonderful comic strip idea integrating Bitmojis, photos, and comic strip style to a Google Slides assignment for students.

In the past (in the classroom), my students started with blank paper and created their comic strips in that method. But with Stay-At-Home learning for the rest of the school year, I wanted something that would peak the interest of my students. So, why not a comic strip???

First, I selected my topic. In my case with teaching World Geography, it would be the region of North Africa and Southwest Asia. I selected cities, famous landmarks, and historic regions for the students to choose from. Each student needed to select two of the places from the chart.

These cities, landmarks, and regions were selected based upon the
Virginia Standards of Learning for World Geography.

Next, students were given tools for research. Our library has subscriptions to Encyclopedia Britannica and other online research engines. Students were given the goal of researching to pretend that you were visiting that location – what would you see, what would you do, what do you find interesting about the location?

Next came the building of the Comic Strip in Google Slides. Students were given the choice to mix and mingle the two locations or they could use one slide for each location. Students needed to use at least two slides and they were given the option to duplicate and use the same slide or mix and match between the styles.

Slides formats for the students came from Ditch that Textbook and from an unnamed source for a document called Comic Book – Template. Both sources are linked below in Resources.

Within the comic strip students needed photos to support their ideas. Since very few of my students had ever traveled to the region, we curated photos from Google Search within Google Slides for Creative Commons images. Captions were added using speech bubbles or other shapes.

BUT…. we also needed to have some fun with it and let the students’ creativity shine even more…. So on to the coup d’etat….

Using Bitmoji to create personality!!!

Students now had the option to insert their own Bitmoji into the Comic Strip as the main character. A word of caution though… on Chromebooks we had to circumnavigate some issues:

Students need to install the Chrome Extension for Bitmoji. Check with your district to see if this extension is blocked as it was in my district.
Students will need a Bitmoji account already set up on another device or they will need to log on with their Snapchat.
The Bitmoji avatar needs to be created on the separate device before it can be used on the Chromebooks.
After those steps, the Bitmoji extension is found in the toolbar and can be accessed in Google Slides (and in email as several students quickly discovered).

I did offer for students who did not want to use Bitmoji to just leave that step out.

Additionally, students need examples. Thus, I created an example for visiting Abu Dhabi (which was not on the list) so that students had an idea of how to integrate the captions, photos, and Bitmoji into the comic strip.