Comic in the Classroom

I created the comic above on toondoo.com. This is a great and easy to use website that could be a fabulous teaching tool in the classroom. Students can create their own comics centering around whatever material they are studying. Creating political cartoons could be a great way to help them understand political and social science. When I was in middle school, we had an assignment in our English class to create a newspaper. Each student made their own newspaper with articles, advertisements and cartoons. I am terrible at drawing and if I had known about this free internet tool I would have had so much more fun creating the project. I was very limited as to what I could draw and it held me back from a couple ideas. I'm not saying this should replace drawing but it could be an extra option for students. Also, teachers could create cartoons about the class and their students. Students would love seeing a funny comic about themselves. This comic took me only about 15 minutes to create and though I could have spent more time on it decorating the background, I found the essential parts and created something that conveyed a message.

This comic is illustrating the difference between technological natives and immigrants. The comic is a humorous twist on our typical perception of technology natives since we usually think of younger people being technologically savvy and the elderly being technologically ignorant. Will adding technology to the classroom eliminate common classroom items such as white board markers, pens & pencils, crayons and paper? It seems like a stupid question but new classroom technology such as interactive white boards and laptops make the objects that you and I grew up using all day everyday not as functional and as used. What will the classroom be like in 5, 10 or 20 years? Will we be solely using technology? Just something to ponder and be aware of.