iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

comics

A Comic Creation Contest for Kids

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Last month comic templates were added to the popular Book Creator iPad app. Book Creator is hosting a contest to showcase those new templates. The contest is open to students under the age of 13. To enter students have to create a comic story by using the templates in the Book Creator iPad app. The winner will receive an iPad Pro and two runners-up will receive iPad minis.

The rules of the contest are quite complex so make sure you read them all before your students begin. One of the rules that jumps out is that you cannot have more than three entries from the same school. Therefore, you might need to host your own contest within your school to determine which comics will be entered into the Book Creator contest.

Watch the video embedded below to learn more about the comics creation option in Book Creator.

Create Comics in the Latest Version of Book Creator for iPad

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book_creator The popular Book Creator iPad app received a great update this week. The full version of Book Creator now includes tools for creating comics. The comic creation tools include a large selection of layouts, speech bubbles, drawing tools, stamps, and stickers. You can even include your own pictures in the comics that you create in Book creator. Watch the video embedded below to learn more about the comics creation option in Book Creator.

Book Creator allows you to export your books to ePub format. The exported file can be opened and read in the Chrome web browser using the free Readium browser extension. This is a great option as it allows a parent who doesn’t have an iPad at home to view his or her child’s work at home.

Comics Head – A Nice iPad App for Creating Comic Strips

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Screen Shot 2014-08-20 at 9.50.36 PM Comics Head is a nice app for creating comic strips on your iPad. The app makes it easy to create comics even if, like me, you don’t have any drawing skills. To create comics on Comics Head you simply choose a template then add a background, characters, and speech bubbles from the art galleries. You can mix and match the backgrounds and characters as much as you like until you arrive at the perfect combination for your story.

As I wrote in post a couple of weeks ago, having students create comic stories can be a good way to get students to share stories about themselves. Through creating comic stories you can have students share favorite stories from their summer vacations. In the process students learn how to use a new tool, practice developing storylines, and they let you in on a little bit of who they are as people.

Create Comics on Your iPad With Halftone 2

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Screen Shot 2014-07-07 at 8.02.52 PM Halftone 2 is a nice iPad app for creating simple comic strips based on your pictures. To get started with Halftone 2 you choose a layout for your comic then import pictures from your iPad’s camera roll. You can add borders and visual effects to each of your imported pictures. After arranging your pictures you can add text in a variety of comic styles. Completed projects can be shared in a variety of ways including email, Dropbox, Twitter, and saving to camera roll. Watch the short video below to learn more about Halftone 2.

Halftone 2 could be a good iPad for students to use because it does not require students to create accounts in order to create comics.

 

Three iPad Apps Students Can Use to Create Comics

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Creating comics can be a good way to get students interested in a creative writing lesson. Earlier this year on Free Technology for Teachers I published a list of five ways to use comics in the classroom. That list is copied below. If you’re looking for some iPad apps that your students can use to complete a comics project, take a look at the three I have reviewed below the list of ideas for using comics in the classroom.

1. Character Analysis: Have your students choose a favorite character from a favorite story and re-write that character into a comic strip story. In their stories students should attempt to demonstrate how their chosen characters would act in a different situation than is described in the original story.

2. Re-telling of historical events: Have your students create short comic strip stories about significant historical events. For example, students could create comic strips about Alexander Graham Bell inventing the telephone. The comic strip could have scenes of Bell working in his laboratory or talking to friends about his invention.

3. Create alternative book reports: Rather than writing a book report have your students create three to five frame comic strips covering the key parts of books they’ve recently read.

4. Create digital citizenship lessons. Have your students create comic strips in which they demonstrate the proper responses to unsafe digital citizenship behaviors.

5. Express feelings: Creating comic strips can be a good way for students to re-tell a situation that made them feel happy, sad, or mad. The use of facial expressions on comic characters is a nice way for students to express their feelings even if they don’t write much within the scene itself.
Screen Shot 2014-03-07 at 2.41.35 PM Make Beliefs Comix is a free multilingual comic strip creation tool that I’ve featured many times over the years on Free Technology for Teachers. Last month, Make Beliefs Comix released an updated iPad app for creating comic strips. The best feature of the app is that it supports the creation of comics in seven languages; English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Latin. The free Make Beliefs Comix iPad app allows students to create two, three, and four panel comic strips. To create comics in the Make Beliefs Comix iPad app you simply select the number of frames you want to use then choose the characters that you want to feature in your story. After choosing your frames and characters you can type text into speech bubbles to tell your story.

Screen Shot 2013-02-24 at 9.38.55 AM Strip Designer is a great comic strip creation tool to add to your students’ iPads. Priced at $2.99 USD it is $2 less than Comic Life and is just as good. Strip Designer provides dozens of comic strip layouts from simple one frame comics to one page layouts in a variety of configurations to multiple page layouts there is probably a layout that works for all students. And if not, your students can create their own custom comic strip layouts in Strip Designer. Strip Designer allows students to create comics from scratch by drawing pictures, taking pictures, or importing pictures. Students can import pictures from a variety of places including Facebook, Dropbox, and the camera roll on their iPads. Each frame in your students’ comic strips is created individually and is not tied to an overall theme. This means that one frame in their comic strips could be based on a photo and the next frame could be based on a drawing. The borders and shading effects for each frame can be individually adjusted too. To help students really tell stories through comics, Strip Designer offers a slew of text editing tools, digital stickers, and drawing tools.

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Screen Shot 2013-02-15 at 9.40.05 AM XnSketch is an iPad app that allows you to take pictures on your iPad and turn them into cartoons or add sketch effects to your pictures. You can also use the app to affect the color saturation and clarity of your pictures. All of the images that you alter in XnSketch can be saved to your camera roll or shared to other applications on your iPad. XnSketch is a good option if you’re looking for a simple tool that students can use to enhance their pictures to use in comic strips. If they want to use their XnSketch images in a Google Presentation they could share them to Google Drive through their iPads.