Bitstrips for Schools

Bitstrips for Schools is a great tool for engaging students through the creative, storytelling medium of the comic strip.

I made this bitstrip comic as an exemplar for the students in my Grade 7 placement class.

In my Grade 7 placement class we are learning How to identify purpose and audience in various media texts.

We will be using bitstrips so that students can apply their knowledge of purpose and audience through the creation of their own three panel comic strip.  They will be creating comics that appeal to a specific target audience within their school (either primary, junior or intermediate students) and who's purpose is to inform this group of students about an event/activity or issue at play within their school community.

In my example I chose an Intermediate audience and the purpose of informing them that Intermediate students at our school are nervous about receiving their vaccination needles this week.

Earlier in the week, students had the opportunity to explore various types of media texts (book covers, magazine advertisements, newspapers, pamphlets, etc.) and answer questions related to identifying purpose and audience, which they then presented to their classmates.

I was impressed by the students' analysis of these texts and am looking forward to seeing them apply the techniques that proved useful to them during that process (in which they relied heavily on visual cues from the texts to help them identify the purpose and audience) to their comics.

I'm hoping to post a more detailed summary of our adventures exploring this activity, and hopefully will have some examples of student work to share!

I am super excited for this project, and can't wait to learn more about bitstrips!

Edublog Post #6: Review

Note: This blog post is post #6 of a series of 'edublog posts' I'll be creating as part of my EDUC Technology Class.

Hello Gr. 7s,

Since it is one of our goals to get to know our educational technologies more this year, I've been trying to brush up on my skills and come up with some fun, engaging activities for us all.

I've been having lots of fun receiving my SMARTboard training, and hope you've been enjoying the activities we've tried out in class.

But there is another educational technology that will soon be entering our classroom, and that is our class set of ipads, which will be arriving in the next two weeks!

I am very excited to learn more about how ipad usage in the classroom can help us interact with one another and connect with some of the incredible resources that are available to us on the world wide web.

We'll be having some fun developing media projects with our ipads, and developing meaningful interactions with technology that enable us to appreciate the way in which we can use technology as a tool to enhance our creativity, at the same time that we continue to explore nature and 'learning through doing and creating'.

I'm really excited for us all, that we have the opportunity to take part in such an exciting program and know that we will encounter some wonderful things together!

My journey towards technological understanding is an ongoing process, and one that I am excited to share with you all as we learn together!

                                                                                                                                           -Miss Pollard