Watching my young niece play with Photocomic made me realize what a good app this is for project work in or out of the classroom. Making comics, magazines and so on has long been a typical classroom project. I remember many years ago asking taking in a pile of old magazines and getting students to cut out pictures to make stories. An app such as Photocomic brings this activity up to date and unlike the magazine allows students to include their own photos. The app works on both the iPhone and Ipad, and costs £1.49 in the UK iTunes store. It a nut shell it allows the user to turn photos in to a comic strip. This can be anything from one picture to a maximum of 5 (admittedly 5 is a bit limiting). You get to choose what layout you want as you can see from the screenshot below.
Having done that the next step is to populate each ''box" with a photo. So at this point the student(s) need to come up with an idea of a story so they can decide the order of the pictures. Adding a picture is simply clicking on the plus (seen above in the middle of the screen) , this opens the photo folder and then you simply choose. Having got the pictures in place the next step is to add text. As it is a comic there is a lovely array of comic book 'words'. You simply click on tool bar and then the sound you want and drag it into place.
The same principle applies to the adding of text, with a simple click to add text. Once ready the finished strip can be saved and shared via email, twitter or email. The good thing about an app such as this is that if the students don't all have access to a pad or phone they can work together. A simple lesson idea would be to give the students a topic and a number of photos they have to include - and then get to work together in groups to produce a strip. The strips are then displayed around the room, collated to produce a student magazine or shared on a blog. In my opinion, an app like this excellent for class use as it is simply and makes use of the camera, app and the ability to share. There are quite a few different ones to look at once you get onto iTunes, so happy comic making.