Comic Slips Revisited!

What's a Comic Slip?

It is a comic, it is an exit slip, it is a comic slip! I created a post earlier in 2016 about the idea behind the comic slip. I love the idea of gathering data at the end of a lesson. It allows you to measure student learning and comfort level on a topic or skill. This allows the teacher to create differentiated/personalized learning experiences for students and also provides valuable data for teacher reflection. What better way to find out how well a lesson went than to have students fill out a quick thought about the learning experience?

I've had the opportunity to present the concept of Comic Slips to teachers numerous times both within my district and at area conferences. Usually when presenting to teachers, I spend more time focusing on Google Drawings than on the comic portion as I want teachers to know all the functions and features of Google Drawings so that it can be used for much more than just a quick comic builder. However, when I visit a class, it is very much focused on the comic process. There is a lot a person can do with Google Drawings. Keeping a specific focus one project at a time works much better for young minds.

Comic Slips Revisited?

Recently, I had the opportunity to visit Mrs. Davis' fourth grade. She attended one of my comic slips training sessions over the summer.. Mrs. Davis wanted to get her students all set up and rolling so she could create a fun opportunity for students to share their learning. So now that I've had a few opportunities to actually demonstrate my idea to a few classes, here are my tips:

1. Create a single folder for their comics in Google Drive. We name our folder "my comics" so that it would be easily identifiable. Do this first so that students can save their pictures directly to the folder on their Chromebooks.
2. Have students create three pictures with www.webcamtoy.com. I specifically have the students find the "comic book" filter when they use this site and they take a picture demonstrating three different modes of learning:
• "I got it!" A happy face and a thumb up.
• "So-so" A facial expression that shows they kind of understand, but need more help.
• "No way!" A sad face with a thumb pointing down.
3. Make an assignment for them in Google Classroom to "create" a Google Drawing. You want an exit slip to be fast. So have them create it straight from Google classroom instead of them creating the drawing from Drive and uploading it. 
   
4. Show the students how to upload one of their pictures straight from Drive, add a speech bubble, and customize the text and speech bubble just a little. There are so many options in Google Drawings, that students could spend forever adjusting and editing.
5. Show students that they merely need to close out of their Google Drawing tab to return to classroom. The "turn in" button should be there waiting for them. No additional uploads are necessary.
6. Set up a second assignment for an actual comic slip run. The goal of exit slips is to get information from students without taking a ton of class time. It isn't a full reflection. So I set the time limit for this example on what they learned about creating a comic slip to just five minutes. Out of 25 students, 22 were able to create a drawing, upload their image, annotate it, and turn it into classroom. That isn't too bad for a group of fourth graders that had never used Google Drawings prior to my visit. 

The Results

Mrs. Davis is ready to launch a comic slip whenever she wants quick feedback on a lesson. All she needs to do is create the assignment in Google Classroom and they will do the rest. No need to revisit Webcamtoy to take new pictures. They will use the ones they have saved in their Google Drive folder. 

Check out the fun we had in my video below: