Bitstrips for Schools

Teacher Barb Morris of Gracefield Public School and her students have had great success using Bitstrips to illustrate scientific principles.  Here’s what Barb has to say:

Tell us about your students’ reaction to Bitstrips for Schools.
Extremely excited and motivated.

Your students have made tons of Bitstrips! What kind of stuff have they been about?
Started out getting familiar with the program (family potrait, speech bubble lessons)  and then I created my own assessments based on learning in the grade 6/7 science classes. (Thermal Energy)

Did you learn anything new about your students through their comics?
Students that normally struggle to answer questions orally or in writing found this format helpful.   They were able to express their understanding through using Bitstrips.

What advice do you have for other teachers on getting the most out of Bitstrips for Schools?
Don’t let the students drift on the program.  Give them a focus and take advantage of the posted assignments.  Also, make your own assignments.  It’s really fun and easy to do.

Examples of her students’ work:

This English class from Byngmount Beach Public School really understand comics, and have made some wildly imaginative educational Bitstrips under the guidance of their teacher, Lindsay Porter. Here’s what she has to say about her class:

Tell us about your students’ reaction to Bitstrips for Schools.

The students love using Bitstrips, both for school assignments and for their own enjoyment at home.  It really offers them a different way to express their knowledge on a topic – a way that provides them with the opportunity to be creative and interact with each other and with me using technology that they love.  It’s not often you hear cheers ‘yay!’ when you tell your class they’re going to be writing summaries…but you do when you tell them they get to write their summary as a comic in Bitstrips.

Your students have made tons of Bitstrips! What kind of stuff have they been about?

When I was first introduced to the website I assigned a few of the sample shared activities for the kids to use to play around with the site and get familiar with it.  The ‘family portrait’, ‘knock-knock joke’, and ‘express your feelings’ activities gave the students the opportunity to learn how to manipulate the props, use appropriate speech bubbles and caption boxes and change their character’s facial expressions and body positions to match up with what they were writing.  They’ve made comics in response to a drama activity based on the book, ‘Not a Box’, as well as a health assignment where they need to get across the health risks of smoking.  Their newest assignment is a procedural writing activity and we will be looking at using Bitstrips to present written summaries of non-fiction texts. I also get quite a few ’silly’ or ‘just for fun’ kind of comics submitted for sharing too…and these are always interesting to look at!

Did you learn anything new about your students through their comics?

I think each activity that the students participate in on the site provides a way to learn more about them…from the dynamics of their family to their interests and sense of humor.  It’s been interesting to catch all the new pieces of information that they put out there while creating their comics.

How has Bitstrips for Schools helped you teach?

Bitstrips for Schools is a great motivational tool for reluctant writers.  Students who would normally shut down at the thought of a traditional writing assignment end up asking to stay in at recess to work on their comics.  Knowing that I have something to help differentiate for those students and sustain their interest in a classroom task makes my job a little easier.

I also like having the opportunity to respond to student’s work at any time and post responses for them so that they can edit and revise their work.  It gives me the chance to interact with each student and talk to them about their writing, in writing!  The look forward to reading my posts about their work and they really do take my comments and tips to heart and work hard to make improvements.

What advice do you have for other teachers on getting the most out of Bitstrips for Schools?

Start with something fun.  Make your avatar with your class and spend time at school allowing them to play around making their own characters and exploring all the things available to them.  Take the time to make your own comics and familiarize yourself with all the tools available so you can easily introduce them to the kids.  Allow particularly proficient students the chance to teach the rest of the class something interesting that they figured out.  Once the kids realized all that they could do with the website, it made completing the assigned activities much easier.

You’ve sent us some examples of student work. What can you tell us about these strips and the students who made them?

This was a comic the students completed after we read the book, “Not a Box” by Antoinette Portis as a starting point for a drama activity.  It was just meant as a fun way to get more familiar with the website using something that they had all had fun with in another class.

The ‘No Smoking Please!’ comics followed our health unit on substance abuse.

Deborah Zamin’s Grade 8 class from John English Junior Middle School has been making some fantastic group-work comics about responsibility and empathy.  They’re our final class of the week before the holiday break.  Here’s what Deborah has to say:

Tell us about your students’ reaction to Bitstrips for Schools.

They really enjoyed working on their assignments and I was so impressed by the volume and depth of their stories. Even from the get go, with the creation of the class avatars – they were enthusiastic. I think they enjoyed being able to login to our class and find their name on the class roster for them to click and get going and that was neat. The media literacy itself assignment was a rather serious topic on Responsibility and Empathy and yet the comic strip genre did not impede them in any way from conveying their message in an appropriatel way. I really liked the way website allowed us to transcend genres.  The comics did require use of the steps of the writing process as well – many groups went through multiple drafts. We discussed how crucial those steps are in drafting a written essay as well.

Absolutely. Making it fun means kids will write more. The website was a student-centered versus teacher-centered unit wherein students become tutors of other students and even taught me about the many features as we went along. I observed that the site is accessible and encourages all learning styles. It was similar to writing their own mini graphic novel, which is a popular genre among students.

It has emphasized the relevance of media literacy in classroom teaching.  The students are comfortable with and enjoy using technology and it promotes communication among them.  Bitstrips was exceedingly easy to use to prepare a class assignment, it is accessible, intuitive and straightforward  The Bitstrips lent itself well to use of our interactive SmartBoard in the lab and other media such as video, film, music and photography. When it came time to present their projects, it was really neat to see the multiple forms of technology they incorporated into their work all originating from the creation of their comics. There was nothing to dislike about the site – I had fun myself with comics.

Start by viewing activities that other teachers have shared and attempt one with your class. Go through the classroom set up of names and design your own avatar to demonstrate your own motivation. Have fun with it! Give students school time to work on their projects… it is time consuming.
It is fun as a group project.

Happy Holidays to you all. You are doing a great job!

This high school English class from Vero Beach, Florida provides some great examples of how Bitstrips for Schools can be used to teach sophisticated concepts to advanced students.

Tell us about your students’ reactions to Bitstrips for Schools.

They were really excited to do something totally different as an assessment. We do a lot of analytical writing, so it was a nice change of pace.

Your students have made tons of Bitstrips! What kind of things have they been about?

There were two separate assignments. One was during our Persepolis unit. Persepolis is a graphic novel memoir, and I wanted the students to internalize visual syntax and semantics by seeing how hard it is to create tone with images. They were asked to create an autobiographical strip. The other assignment was during a Jane Austen unit in which students were asked to depict a scene from the book.

What advice do you have for other high school teachers who are thinking about using Bitstrips for Schools?

Think about their avatars. I didn’t specify that my students look like themselves in the virtual classroom, and I was very surprised at the very creative ways they expressed themselves as avatars.  Learn the software so that your expectations are reasonable. I did a strip myself as an example for my students.

Did you learn anything new about your students through their comics?
I learned LOTS about my students in the autobiographical assignment. We had some very interesting class discussions based on some of what we learned.

How has Bitstrips for Schools helped you teach?

The Language Curriculum now incorporates visual literacy. I can’t think of a better tool for exploring that.

What advice do you have for other teachers on getting the most out of Bitstrips for Schools?
Be clear in your expectations. Students seem to be more comfortable with stricter guidelines: number of frames, content, etc…

You’ve sent us some examples of your students’ work. What can you tell us about these strips and the students who made them?
It’s really tough to choose which ones to share!  Our unit about the book Persepolis generated some very interesting discussions about identity. One of my students Linh did a strip about the struggle with identity he went through as an American boy growing up in his Vietnamese household.

The Jane Austen assignment generated some interesting versions of scenes in the book. Eric W’s strip was simple, but it conveyed quite a lot about the characters.

Anything else you’d like to say?

Thanks for a great website!