Cartoon and Comics

Comic strip about Going Green!
Pixton was easy and fun to use.  Students would have such a good time creating a comic strip using Pixton. It has a good variety of characters, changing character settings, and backgrounds.  Once the comic strip is ready, you can share it various ways. Some ways include: embed, email, print, Facebook, and Twitter.


Spirit Week Comic Strip

Make Beliefs Comix was much harder to use.  In this site, the characters facial features cannot be changed. For example, I would've loved for my poodle to be wearing the same clothes throughout the strip.  Also, it was hard to use some of its features like deleting, making the picture big or small, and moving the pictures around the window.  I can already see students getting frustrated. I don't think I'll be using it in the future.


Library Hours Comic Strip (Screenshot)

ToonDoo is the site that I would strongly recommend to my students. It is very user-friendly and has many options for its users.  My first choice was going to be Pixton, but when I saw that ToonDoo had many more icons, backgrounds, and speech bubble options, I had to change my mind.

I plan to use comic trips in the future as announcements or advertisements for the library, just like the comic strips above.

Tellagami- Fun!
https://tellagami.com/gami/W3NBFQ/

Online Book Communities

I knew here were websites where we could keep track of books that we've read or want to read, but I had never signed up or played around with one.  After exploring Goodreads, LibraryThing, Shelfari, and Booklikes, I found the advantages of signing up for such websites.  Readers can keep track of the books that they have read, they can read comments on books that they want to read and then shelf them.  What I really liked is that you can create shelves with your own subjects.  This can really help in reminding yourself about what you thought about a certain book. I remember reading lots of book in middle school, but I rarely remember details about those books and adding comments to books that you add on your shelves will definitely help! From the four websites, I liked Shelfari and Booklikes the best!

Goodreads: I use Goodreads a lot when I want to read comments about a certain book or search a similar book to one that I already read and enjoyed reading.   This website was fairly easy to use when searching for books that I wanted to put on my shelf.  But that was about it! I enjoyed reading others' comments about the books that I had chosen.

LibraryThing: This one was the one I liked the least.  I don't know if it was my browser (did not have any problems with the other sites) or the website but searching for books took an eternity!

Shelfari and Booklikes: These two sites are the ones that I would recommend to my students.   They are very similar and fun and easy to work with.  I loved that as you are shelving the books, you can add tags, comments, ratings, etc.  I wish this was available when I was younger so that I would be able to write my comments about the books that I had read.  Most of these ratings and comments can be shared through Facebook or Twitter which is also very nice! I also liked that it is linked to Amazon.  When I clicked on a book that I wanted to read "Love in the Time of Cholera", it was able to take me to Amazon and buy it with one simple click for my Kindle.
 

Podcast

I had previously created a Podcast for another course, but I had more fun creating this one.  Podcasts can be used as a learning resource for students.  Podcasting is user-friendly and is a fun way for students to present an assignment or project and for teachers to present a lesson.  As teachers, we may use podcasting for lectures. These are helpful for when, for example, a student is absent or did not comprehend what was lectured, they may go back and listen to the podcast at their own convenience.  I also liked it for leaving brief "you better behave and complete all assignments" messages for days that I'm out and leave my 3rd graders with a substitute.  As librarians, they can be used for short, brief messages or lessons, like the one I created.  Unfortunately, music cannot be used using Soundcloud, which was the tool I found to be more user-friendly, but I had my iPad on the side to provide the intro and ending music.  Students can use podcasts to present their information on a given assignment or project; I enjoyed the student-made podcasts that Dr. Perry shared with us. Kids now-a-days are so creative!