John Medina Rule 10: Vision trumps all other senses.“We are incredible at remembering pictures. Hear a piece of information, and three days later you’ll remember 10% of it. Add a picture and you’ll remember 65%.”

For helping the students to remember the new words quickly, I have used Comic Life project with sixth-grade Mandarin beginner students. Comic Life (Plasq; available from http://www.plasq.com/) is a comic-creation software program.

Designing an Appearance Page

Materials: Internet access, Comic Life software

Time: three sessions, one for vocabulary introduction, one for application practice and finding pictures, and one for creating the Comic Life page

Steps:

The students

  • Learn appearance adjective vocabulary. Then they choose 6-8 adjectives.
  • Search for copyright-free images, http://search.creativecommons.org/; http://www.pics4learning.com/   
  • Using the Internet and a favorite image-search engine, and download full-size images (not thumbnails) to a folder.
  • Open Comic Life, creating a new document in Comic Life and applying a page template.
  • Navigate to the folder containing the pictures, then arrange the pictures in the software.
  • Add, resize, and reposition images in the comic panes.
  • Add caption text to each image.
  • Save the comic page and print the document.
  • Share the projects in the class.

The whole project went very smoothly, the students remembered all the words quickly. The only challenge for the students was to type Chinese characters, because they have to set the keyboard again: Control Panel—Languages and Region—Format—Select Chinese (Taiwan, traditional form).

What I discovered for the first time , is that on the Comic Life you can export the template to movie. I should explore further how to do this on Windows.

 Created by Yoon

 

Created by Rebecca