Diálogos en Comic Life

4th-grade students often listen to and interpret Spanish-language dialogues in Spanish class. This year I put a twist on it by having the students create a comic using the dialogue. This additional step required students to interpret the conversation and then add appropriate images to convey the feelings and content of the conversation. These pre-recorded dialogues often accompany world-language textbook "systems" and are in line with the curriculum, so all I had to do was choose several conversations from our unit of study to provide to students as a choice. As an added and unforeseen bonus, a few students actually chose to write their own dialogues!

Apps:

• Comic Life
• Camera
• Dropbox
• Pages

Steps:

1. Students listened to dialogues and discussed their meaning with the each other.
2. Students received a written copy of the dialogues and chose one for the project. Students also viewed a sample Comic Life dialogue created by me (the teacher).
3. Students accessed a Pages document on Dropbox from which they copied and pasted the lines from their dialogues. *Tip: copying and pasting became a bit problematic, so some students chose to type the dialogue directly into Comic Life. Should students prefer this method, I suggest adding the International Keyboard for your language in Settings. This will prevent spell check from substituting the other language's words with English and will give students easy access to typing characters not available on the English keyboard.
4. Students became the characters in the dialogues by taking pictures of themselves and adding to the comic. *Tip: this presented a great opportunity to invite parent volunteers in to escort the students around the school to take the most appropriate pictures.
5. Students shared the final comic to Dropbox as a pdf file.