Tanya Groetchen’s Speculative Futures

I love comic strips, and when I browsed through my peers’ speculative narrative pages, Tanya’s comic strip for her first narrative drew me into her post right away. I also noticed that Tanya used Animaker to make her video for her second narrative. Like my task, we chose to focus on personalized learning companions.

I also chose to make a video, but I used Powtoon, and my video has music, images and words, but not audio. Including audio in videos is always something I struggle with, so I used to avoid anything audio-related. But, I am proud to say that, this term, I have successfully overcome the fear of podcasting. However, if I needed to voice my cartoon characters, I might need to have “a few voices.” So, I was glad to learn more about Animaker from Tanya’s post and discover that Animaker voice allows users to create human-like voices with text-to-speech functionality.

Both Pixton and Animaker that Tanya used are new to me. Still, I am very excited at the possibilities of using comic strips and cartoons as instructional tools in my classroom. Kohne (2019) has indicated that comic strips spark student’s interests in learning and infuse creativity in demonstrating learning. I believe educational comics is highly potential in allowing students to practice important language skills when sharing and communicating ideas.

 

Reference:

Kohnke, L. (2019). Using comic strips to stimulate student creativity in language learning. TESOL Journal, 10(2), 1-5. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesj.419