Cartoons are fun, especially if they're free...

Platform: iPad app

Grade Levels: 3rd-8th

Subjects: Language Arts, Social Studies

Price: Free


Purpose & Features: ComicsHeadLite is a free app that helps students make short comics to illustrate a story or idea. One of the great features about this app is that the free, or "Lite," version is very usable in the classroom to create simple comics. It's pretty straightforward - my 8th grade students figured out how to use it in just a few minutes. It's not as feature-rich as some of the other comic creation apps out there, but sometimes you want your students using an app that's simple and only has a limited number of options.

Project Ideas: This app is well-suited for the not-so-big creative assignment to show understanding. It gives students creative ways to summarize or tell a story in their own words with the help of visuals. Don't have budding artists in your class? No problem. The app lets students choose from a library of characters, backgrounds, and objects to help illustrate their story. The more drawing-oriented crowd can choose to draw if they like. The app only allows for a maximum of 4 frames per page, so if your students are summarizing a short story, they really have to think about main ideas. Furthermore, the comic layout forces students to add text that is brief and told from a certain character's point of view. 

My language arts class read the short story "The Gift of the Magi" by O. Henry. After we read and discussed, I asked them to illustrate their understanding of the story's structure and message by creating their own story in comic form that followed the overall premise of the original (see student example above). Most students were successful at using the app, despite some minor bugs. A few encountered glitches at certain points when they discovered that the app hadn't saved certain parts of their comics. Saving and sharing the comics was easy: students just selected the "Save As Image" button to save to Photos.

Overall, this is a free cartoon app that's straightforward and easy-to-use. While I wouldn't recommend it for large or in-depth projects requiring lots of features and customization, it gets the job done for smaller assignments.