In this video I'm gonna show you everything you need to know for how to
use my favorite digital comics program, Storyboard That. Creating digital comics
in your classroom is an excellent opportunity to provide students with a
fun, engaging way to practice rigorous academic skills. Storyboard That is
consistently a huge hit in my class and I guarantee your students are gonna love
it. My name is Sam Kary and this is my YouTube channel for The New EdTech
Classroom. In this video I'm gonna show you some of the examples of digital
comics that students have created in my class, I'm going to show you how to set
up templates that you can push out to your students using Storyboard That, and
then I'm also going to show you just some of the basic editing and creation
features that students need to know and that you'll need to know if you're going
to be teaching them how to create digital comics. As always, you can find
all the documents that I reference in this video on my website at www.newedtechclassroom.com
and if you find this video helpful, please make sure to share it
with other teachers that you know, hit the like button, and consider subscribing
to my channel as well as clicking that notification bell to make sure you don't
miss any of my weekly education technology videos. Right now I'm going to
show you some student examples so that you can see a few different ways that I
use digital comics with my students. The first example we're looking at here is
of a Storyboard that a student created for a book that we're reading in class,
"Freak the Mighty." So you can see here that students created dialogue for the
characters in the books, as well as different summaries about what happened
in each of the major plot points of the story.
Next, I also use digital comics as a way for students to demonstrate their
understanding in a creative way. For this particular assignment, students created a
Paleolithic to Neolithic changes comic book where they had to show their
understanding about the change that agriculture brought to the world. So here
I had students take nonfiction information and turn it into creative
dialogue and then they also had to summarize
why the particular change that they were writing about was important. And then the
last example I'm going to show you here is actually a project that we did across
disciplines where students studied a marine mammal and they included real
pictures of their marine mammal and a whole timeline of what happened to that
marine mammal after it was rescued by the Marine Mammal Center, diagnosed, and
then released back into the wild. So you can see that digital comics are really
dynamic and can be used for lots of different purposes across subjects.
They're really great for synthesizing information, for having students
visualize what they've been reading and also to have students practice different
skills like taking nonfiction information and converting that
nonfiction information into creative dialogue. As with any project that you do
in class, the ultimate success of the product that students create is going to
be dependent upon the pre-planning that goes into it. What I'm going to show you
are two different rough drafts that I use. The first is a very basic rough
draft for setting up the comic book that students created to show the changes
from Paleolithic to Neolithic ages. Here students are really going to focus on
the content that is going into their panels. And then another example here is
a rough draft version of the storyboard that students created in my class. Again
I emphasize that the content is correct in the rough draft and I use the time
when students are working on their rough drafts to circulate around the room and
make sure that it looks good before we jump into using that tech. Okay
so let's say you're ready to import your students into Storyboard That. What
you're going to do is go up to 'My Classes,' click 'Add Classes and invite
Students.' Here you're going to create a new class that you want to add, click 'Okay
Next Step,' select how students are going to sign in, either with Google, with
Microsoft, or you can manually enter usernames or passwords. Here I'm going to
be given some options for how I want to share the signup link so what I do is I
click 'Copy Signup Link,' so that I can share the URL with my
students. I can select specifically which class I want to send students into if I
have multiple periods or different classes. So here I'm going to select 'Test
Class.' That will create a link that I can now put on Google Classroom. Students
will click on that link, it will take them directly into the portal for Storyboard
That, and then I can create assignments that I'm going to assign
directly to the students that are in that particular class. The next thing
that I'm going to show you is how you can set up a template. I'm actually going
to start by going up to 'Create a Storyboard' and here I'm gonna see the
basic storyboard template that students would also see if you did not pre-
create a template for that. So if you want to change the layout, you can change the
layout options. Here you can have just a cell, you can have a title and the ell,
you can have the cell in the description, the title cell and description. You can
also change the layout to be a Traditional storyboard, you can have a
Cinematic layout, you'll see as well here the Timeline template that I use for
students. So as you can see, there are lots of different options simply for how
you're going to do the layout. So I'm gonna go ahead and select the 'Title Cell
and Description' and I'm also going to change the cells so that they are
stacked vertically as opposed to horizontally. Like you saw in the student
example, I'm gonna make it a 1 by 3 comic. I'll click 'Update Storyboard' and there
you'll see that I now have a slightly different template. There are other
things of course you could do if you want to pre-write instructions into the
template, you can edit the boxes. So here, for example, I could write a sentence
starter that I want students to use. There's also an option to use advanced
tools. If you click on 'Advanced Tools,' one of the tools that I do sometimes use is
'Cell Size.' When you use Cell Size, you can increase the size of the cell so that
when a student logs in to their account they're gonna see that larger cell. Okay
so let's say I'm ready to use this template as an assignment for students.
I'm going to click 'Save' I'll give it a title, I'll click 'Save Storyboard.' Then
I'm gonna scroll down to the bottom and I'm going to click 'Convert Storyboard to
Template.' This is going to allow me to access it now as an assignment that I
push out to students. Now that I'm ready to create an assignment, I'm going to go
up to 'My Assignments,' 'Create a New Assignment,' I'll give that assignment a
name. Here I can customize instructions for the comic and now you'll see the
different templates that I've created that I can now use for my assignment. So
I'm gonna select the template I just created.
I'm gonna go down to 'Next,' now I will select the class that I want to assign
that template to, and now when students log in through that link that I sent
them, they will see the assignment in their dashboard and they'll be able to
access the template and start creating their comics. Now I'm going to show you
the most important tools that you'll need to know in order to teach your
students how to actually make the comic books. The first is that I'm going to
teach students that they're able to access a ton of different scene options
in their digital comics. So as you can see, up top there are all kinds of
different scenes that students can choose from - Towns, Entertainment, Outdoor,
really there are just tons of different options. Once I'm ready to pick the scene
that I want, you select the scene, drag it into the panel, and it will appear. The
scene has a couple of editing options that are useful to show to students. If
you go up to 'Edit Scene,' you'll see that you can change the time of day to night
time, you can change the weather, snow or rain.
So the scenes themselves are really customizable and that's pretty cool. The
next important thing to teach students is how to drag-and-drop characters into
their panels. There are lots of different characters that students can choose from
just like the scenes. You'll see there are adults and teens and modern
characters and characters from medieval times, mythological characters, stuff like
that. So again there are just loads of different options and these characters
are also fully customizable once you drag them in. Once
I find that character that I like, you simply drag-and-drop the character into
the panel, you can pull on the edge of the character to make that character
bigger or smaller, and then even more so than the scenes, the characters are fully
customizable, so you have the option to change their hair color, their skin color,
their eye color, the color of their clothing, even the color of their sandals.
Another basic way to change the appearance of the character, that also
helps make the comics look significantly better and more realistic and not so
static, is to have students edit the different poses of their characters. So
they can do that by going to 'Edit Pose.' Here you'll see that the students have
all kinds of different options for head position, facial expression, position of
the hands and legs, you can have a character sitting down. There's just,
again, all kinds of different things that you can do. So I'm gonna select a focus
face, face to the side, put the hands up. Once you're ready with your character's
pose, select 'Update Pose' and the next thing that I'm going to show students
how to do is find different objects that they can also drag and drop into their
comic panels. So I'm actually going to search for that in the search box here.
Just like the characters, once a student finds an image that they like, they
simply have to drag and drop it into the comic panel. They can adjust the size of
the image as necessary and drag it where they want to go. Here I'm also going to
select an arrow and I just want to show real quick how you can choose the
rotation tool to rotate that arrow in the direction that the student wants it
to face. I'll make that arrow a little bit bigger and drag it where I want to go. In
addition to characters there are also animals. You could direct students to
search for animals. The animals are also available under the characters tab. So
here if I want to have my character hunting a rabbit across
the water, I could do that and also drag the corners of the image to resize it
and change the coloring just like I could with the characters. The next
important basic comic creation function that students need to know is how to add
a textable. Students add a textable by going to the 'Textable' tab. Here you can
drag in any of the dialog boxes that you want a character to use, resize it as
necessary, drag it where you want it to go, and then the text inside of that text
bubble is fully editable. And again here's that opportunity to teach
students how to take some information that they've learned and write some
interesting, funny dialogue. Now that students know the basics about how to
create a comic, I'm going to show them a couple more advanced tools so that they
can make them a little bit faster and customize them a little bit more and
make them look really professional. One important editing tool to make the
comic creation go a little bit faster is to click on the character, click 'Copy'
under edit, and that's actually going to make a copy of the character that the
students could then drag and drop into another panel. If you don't show students
how to do this, they're gonna spend a lot of time recreating the same characters
over and over. A couple of other tools that are useful to know how to use are
the layering tools. So this character is actually properly layered right now - the
bow and the arrow and the character are all in the correct position. But let's
say that I wanted to have that character actually be in front of the bow and
arrow. I can click on the character, go to 'Layers,' click 'Bring Forward,' and notice
how the character's hand is now in front of the bow and arrow. So if that were the
case, I would actually show students how to send that back so that it's more
properly layered and just looks a little bit better. Another cool tool is the 'Crop'
tool that's going to allow students to position their characters in different,
more creative ways. You can do a crop by dragging a
character down into your scene, and let's say that the student wants this
character to be standing in the water. Well right now that looks like they're
just walking on water. So if I want them to show that they're inside of that
water I'm gonna go up to the crop tool, I'm going to drag the crop up, maybe to
the waist, click 'Crop Image,' drag that character down. Maybe I'll edit that pose so
that my character looks startled, maybe they're worried that they're gonna get
shot by that bow and arrow, and now it just looks a little bit more realistic
because I cropped the lower half of the character's body. Now the last thing that
I will also show students how to do is upload their own image. They can go up to
the 'Upload' button, pick an image that they want to upload into their comics,
and the students that do this end up creating these really cool hybrid, real
image with comic image comic books that have a really unique kind of flavor, so it's
also just a cool tool to show students how to do and help them express their
creativity. If you have any questions about how I use digital comics in my
classroom or about digital comics in general, please ask in the comments below.
Even if you just get a single month subscription to Storyboard That, I think
you're definitely going to like it and I pretty much guarantee that your students
are going to be really into creating digital comic books. Thanks so much for
watching my video. If you found it useful, please hit the like button and share it
with other teachers that you know and consider subscribing to my channel and
hitting the notification bell so that you don't miss any of my weekly
education technology tutorials. Thanks and have a great week!