Digital Illiteracy 101

Hi there! Were you expecting to view an informative exploration of a handy digital tool? Me too! So what happened? Well, I was born in 1969...

After I realized that there was no place to insert an 8-rack tape into my laptop, I tried just googling stuff from Professor Bogad's home page and ended up landing on Pixton. Pixton had promise. I love comics and graphic novels, though I'm not too happy about the flat, dead illustration in most of them. However, I know that to get my students writing, the animation is just a MacGuffin to drive the plot. 

I set up an Educator account (you can also choose Student), named my "class," and then created a younger, sexier avatar for myself. Then I got started on my first comic by clicking My Comics and New. This took me to a dashboard type page where I chose an appropriate Background dropped in my handsome and entirely idealized avatar.

After this brilliant achievement, I decided to make a second panel by pressing the Add Panel button on the left-hand side of the dashboard. I selected a new background and found my avatar floating in a laboratory. How unrealistic! So I selected a new, more gravity-appropriate Pose for myself. Here is the result:

(Poses and backgrounds can be selected from a dropdown or searched for.) Finally, with time ticking before this highly effective, totally tutorial post was due, it hit me:

By adding Words (you can choose from Speech, Though, Shout, Whisper) to my pictures and putting them in sequence, I had made a comic. And furthermore, by writing about it and giving you some directions (buttons highlighted in red), I had made a sort of, I don't know, should we call it a how to?

And you can, too. Probably a lot easier than I. This simple four panel comic took me an hour and half to create. Most of that time was just figuring out how to sign up. But I think that students and teachers that have more experience with these types of tools would have no problem. I foresee this being useful to increase literacy and digital literacy among my students. With a bit more practice, I should be able to walk them through it.