Teaching With Comics
Several years ago I began thinking about using illustrations or cartoons to teach. This seemed like a good way to get the message across using a little humor and also showing that learning even at the college level can be fun. I know this is not a new idea– we use graphics and illustrations to teach every day– I just wanted to see if I could integrate short basic cartoons into my teaching. Using Adobe Illustrator I developed a basic cast of characters. I wanted to have a large enough number of characters to give me a little flexibility in my storyline but also keep things simple. Using the really easy to use cartoon editor Comic Life I began developing my comic storyline. These were simple cartoons centered around some concept dealing with online course development. Comic life is so easy to use; just drop the character graphic into the cartoon box and add the dialog text. One of my first cartoons was a basic definition of asynchronous learning which set the tone for all my later work in this series. More on this later……
