It was the beginning of June and Ms. Conklin and I met to talk about a final project. A project the students could have a lot of fun with through the last month, but also a project that would also incorporate their cultural universal unit of study.
We decided to take their research on a location and turn it into a comic book style travel guide. A comic book they create from the ground up and build collaboratively…
Summary:
- Students paired up into teams before coming to the lab to research a location and begin drafting their travel guide
- When they came to the lab every student used Google Drawing to create the “tour guide” character
- Once the characters were made one member of the team created a Google Slides presentation which would become the travel guide
- The guide was then shared with the partner
- The partners worked together to create an informative travel guide with their individual characters having a conversation and resenting the information
Characters:
- First visit to the lab
- We went through a lesson on using shapes, lines, line weight, line color, and fill color in Google Drawing and the students had a week to create their character on their own (in class, at home, etc)
Travel brochure:
- The second visit to the lab
- A week after the Character lesson, we started the Google Slides deck.
- Students learned how to group all the elements of their Google Drawing character and copy/paste it into a Slides deck
- One team member created the Slides file and shared it with the other
- They then proceeded to paste in their characters and use their rough drafts to create their travel brochure
- The third visit to the lab
- After students created the Slides file and began work we didn’t give them much direction or help, we wanted them to explore, experiment, and get creative
- This third lab session was split in half, with the first half being in-depth look at what a few groups had created
- We talked about things that seemed to work from both style and writing standpoints
- We discussed how groups could alter their visuals to better support their text, and their text to better support their visuals
- The fourth visit to the lab
- This was primarily a work session. At this point the students had spent a lot of time outside the lab making changes and building their brochure
- We spent a few minutes in a formal lesson to answer any big technical questions
- The bulk of the period was teams working together and a lot and informal, on the fly, Q&A
Examples of the characters from Google Drawing:
The travel brochure:
This is a folder with a few more examples:
Cultural Universal – Comic Book Travel Guides
All of these examples (both in this post and within the folder) are projects students produced in just 4 lessons at the end of the year. It was a lot of fun and very much a learning experience for both students and teachers. There is a lot of work to be done and we are looking forward to starting this project earlier in the year to give the students more time to edit, revise, and fine-tune.
Looking forward to trying it again next year!