Reading the Classics 'Paper versus Digital' Why not both?

As a child I was and still am an avid reader. I had a Grandfather (hobbyist antique collector) who would fuel my literary interest by giving me 'old- antique' books that he found in his travels. I don't know what happened to most of them now but I still have a fully bound copy of 'The Girl's Own Annual' circa early 1900s chapters separated by the finest tissue paper. Included in this anthology was the typical girlie serial stories right to the helpful hints/advertisements of how to embroider your underwear!
As a child I was desperate to read anything, and I'm not sure how I discovered them (probably through my mother who was a teacher) but I know that I read most of the classics before I was 13. I then discovered 19th Century Gothic literature and that consumed me through my early teens.
When I was teaching full time, I liked to read to my students everyday. It was always a novel, and I particularly liked reading classic novels...but how can you do that in today's world where there is so many differences in our lives compared to one to two hundred years ago. Language is different, context and meaning of words have been changed; we have lost a lot of words and phrases that were used many years ago and they have been replaced with new words and expressions.
We all know that a`movie' of a book is never the same as the book we have read. An experiment I tried out with some Year 3/4 (7 & 8 years old) students a few years ago was when there was a plethora of Disney movies re-released. Peter Pan was the one we focused on. The children and I found as many resources we could and we all gleefully consumed them. Then I started reading the original Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie. They loved it and were totally surprised that the Disney 'Peter Pan' was based on this original story. I purchased and found several copies of the original book and as I read it to the class the students read along at the same time.

Digital Medium
Nowadays we have a new medium to reach children and encourage them to read the old classics. A lot of these books are available free online.

Kids Corner has a wonderful collection of Beatrix Potter Stories with text which students can view or you can download the audio of it and play it through your computer or download onto an iPod (students can listen to the story while reading the printed copy at the same time).
Scroll further down the main website page and there is audio downloads to Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz, Charles Dickens, Grimm's Fairy Tales and Rudyard Kipling.

Book Glutton has a comprehensive collection of all classic books, some of the children ones I have found are Alice in Wonderland, Treasure Island and many more.


You can embed links to the books, read them online, make comments and chat about the booksA Europe of tales is an animated interactive site retelling the ancient myths and legends of their countries stories.

Many Books is a site with free books to download as PDF, e-Reader or Kindle) some of the featured stories are Anne of Green Gables and The Wind in the Willows.
Project Gutenberg is a source of many classic e-books that can be downloaded as webpages or PDFs, have a look at the Velveteen Rabbit, this could be used as a shared reading lesson using an interactive whiteboard or mimio. Use the highlighting tools and pens to find key ideas, note sequencing, answer questions etc.
Page by Page books is a text based comprehensive list of classic books.
Planet PDF
Planet e-book these last two sites are where you can download PDF versions of classic books.
PDF search is a comprehensive search engine for PDF files, search for a book title and find many versions of it.
Feedbooks allows you to download to MP3 players, smartphones, iPods, PDAs and Kindles.


Graphic Novels
Graphic Novels are a great way to lead children into reading the classics and this site Classics Illustrated Comicbooks is one of my favourites. It has a great collection of classics that have been turned into comic books. One of the ways I would use this site is to read the classic novel alongside of each page of the comic, using the illustrations for prediction, clarification and for visual stimulation of what is happening in the story

For older students here is a link to Shakespeare in comic form, download as a PDF

Just Audiobooks
Here are a list of sites where you can download Audiobooks to MP3 players or iPods.
LibriVox
Loudlit is a website where you can download MP3 audiobooks or just listen online. If you don't want to download then plug in speakers into your computer
Free Classic Audiobooks
Candlelight stories have audiobooks, movies and storybooks

Books that are not so classic are available as well at
Sqooltube has video books of Dr Seuss, Berenstain Bears, Maurice Sendak amongst others

iPod and iPhone Apps
There are several 'Apps' that allow you to download to your iPod or phone classic books (i.e. Stanza and eReader)
You can even download classic comics (do a search for Archie).

You can download the entire Shakespeare's plays for free or the Sherlock Holmes collection for $1.29 NZ. For $2.59 you can get 400 fairy tales including Aesop, Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grimm.

iPod and iPhone Audiobooks
There is a huge collection of Audiobooks available, a few free but there is a cost to most of them i.e.
The Wind in the Willows is $14.95 but the voices are well known actors from when it was a radio production. The Ugly Duckling is $2.99, Little Women is $7.99. Be aware when you are buying Audiobooks whether you are buying the Abridged or the Unabridged. If you want the full copy purchase the Unabridged!

Remember if you are downloading to an iPod or iPhone, you can use a Splitter (NZ $20) to include 5 headsets around the same iPod.

All of these digital resources (plus the many thousands I haven't found yet) are available for you to use in your teaching programme. They may just stimulate those reluctant readers to read, and open up a new world to history for those who enjoy reading.
Many of my happiest memories have been of when I read those classic stories and immersed myself in the history of the time. Share these with your students!

Creating Comics in Word

I was working with a teacher today who said he was going to make comics in Word.

To make it look more like a comic, upload your photos to Befunky and cartoonise them. Click on Get Started, click on Cartooniser, click on Browse files, select a photo, click Open, rotate or crop if necessary, click OK and your photo will appear. Click Save, name your photo and click Save to My desktop, click OK you may be asked to Save again. You may want to crop the white border of the photo



I had previously already showed him how to insert Autoshapes onto a page, I usually insert six to a page. Then you click on a shape, go to the Fill can, choose Fill Effects, click on the Picture Tab, click on Choose Picture, select a photo and click Insert.












Once the pictures are inserted then you need to add the speech bubbles and narrative text boxes. This is a wonderful way of publishing children's writing.





You can also do the same thing in PowerPoint but put one photo on each slide and it becomes a Comic Slideshow.

ICT Kids

View more presentations from Jacqui Sharp.

The Hero Factory - Create a Superhero avatar

Kids love to create avatars and what could be better than turning yourself into a 'Superhero'!
The Hero Factory has a range of looks and accessories to create your Superhero.


These can then be downloaded and used as avatars. You will need to crop them before they can use them for that purpose.

A name is generated once you have finished your creation. Mine is 'Whipped Nine Tails'

I could see these characters influencing writing. Students can create them and build their own individual Superhero bios. Students could then work collaboratively together to create their own Superhero world!







R rating: None

Make Beliefs Comix

Create comics with characters, panel prompts and talk balloons MakebeliefsComix. Make 2, 3 or 4 page comics. You can't save or download the comics but you can Email or print (or take a screen capture and paste into Word or PowerPoint).

If you are taking a screen capture for showing in a PowerPoint then make sure that you only do a 2 page comic at a time, that way you will get a better image when you make it bigger on the screen.

Children from Hunua School went on class trip to the local Police Station. They presented the experience they had by creating comics in Make Beliefs Comix and then inserted the finished comics into PowerPoint.

Comic Life and Slideshows

You can make slideshows of comic pages in comic life. Before you start turn the page to horizontal. Go to File - Page Format, click on Landscape.

If this Library is not showing then click on the drop down menu and select Built in basic.

Click on the 'One' template and drag and drop on the page.

Drag your Photo in and add your text bubbles, headings and narrative text.

Add more pages with either 'One' template or with a template that has 2 or 3 spaces on it.

Once you have completed all your pages and saved them, then export them as individual jpegs. Go to File - Export - Export to Images.

The individual pages will be exported as separate jpegs.

These can now be imported into Photo Story, MovieMaker, Keynote or PowerPoint. Add music and you have a comic slideshow.

Be Funky - Catoonise your photos

Be Funky is a photo editing application that will cartoonise your photos in colour or as line drawings.



These can then be saved to your computer.

Use these images to create a cartoon in ComicLife or insert them into Autoshapes in Word or PowerPoint.

There is also a wonderful morphing tool where you can stretch parts of the photo. These boys look like elves now!

Eventually you will be able to cartoonise video clips as well as this is a feature they are working on. See a demo here.

Kerpoof - Motivate children's writing

Kerpoof is a great piece of software that you can use to motivate










children's writing. It is free, colourful and interactive.
Make a Picture - choose a background and make a picture using the graphics provided, use the text button to add text to the page. Print the page out as full A4 or as a card. You can also choose to print it out in full colour or as a colouring book page.

Make a Movie option allows you to create a movie with moving objects. There are 7 different story lines to pick from, several scene pages and a limited amount of graphics for each page. Choose from the animation list to animate the objects. Text can be added to the scene as well. It can be saved to an account at Kerpoof or printed.

Make a drawing has drawing tools where you can create a picture and print it out.

Make a card has 8 preset cards including Birthday, Thank you etc. with a limited set of graphics to add.

The Make a Story is my favourite option with 19 different scenes, some graphics, text boxes and text speech bubbles. You can also add more scenes to the story.

This would be a great site for those children who don't have anything to write about as it provides the scenes and graphics, but they get to add the words. They can manipulate the graphics and can add their own drawings to it by using the pen tool. It prints out beautifully as well.

Toondoo and Creating Comics

Since posting on this blog about Kerpoof, I have been directed to another comic making interactive online site. This one is called ToonDoo. You can make 1-3 page comics using numerous backgrounds and graphics. You can change the body position of the figures and facial expressions. There are lots of props and drawing tools to create your own backgrounds. You can save the comics and publish for everyone to see or you can publish privately. If you publish for anybody to see then anybody can comment. That was the only problem with this programme were the comments as they could be inappropriate for children. Some of the cartoons made by other people were a little dodgy as well.
The actual editing page is fine but the main home page changes all the time so you are never sure what is going to pop up. But it is still a worthwhile site to use with careful monitoring. Particularly for younger children I would set up the editing page for them, then there is no need for them to see the home page.
There is no download feature which is a shame as it would be great to download the comic and print it whole screen. But there are always ways around this, you can print out the page when it is in View mode, cut out the comic and glue on to other paper. Or you can take a screen capture (Windows: press the Print Screen button on your keyboard, open Paint, Press Ctrl V and then use the square selector tool to crop the area you need. Copy paste that piece into the Wordprocessor of your choice) Mac Users press Shift, Ctrl, Option and 4, click and drag around the comic, paste into your wordprocessor page.
Again this is another great interactive writing motivating tool.

Bubblr, create comics or photo slideshows

Run your mouse without clicking over the slideshow to make it move.
Another way of publishing photos in a comic strip is using Bubblr. Search for photos in Flickr by typing in a search word or a user name. Drag the photos you want to use down into the panels, drag the speech bubbles up and type in words. click on After Current to add more photos, click Publish when you are finished. This comic strip will be saved and then you can make the choice of emailing, adding to a blog site or printing.
This could be a great way to motivate reluctant writers as they can search for photos that interest them or they could be photos on certain topics. Be aware though that it is possible to get questionable photos if you type inappropriate words.

ToonDoo and creating comics on line

Since posting on this blog about Kerpoof, I have been directed to another comic making interactive online site. This one is called ToonDoo. You can make 1-3 page comics using numerous backgrounds and graphics. You can change the body position of the figures and facial expressions. There are lots of props and drawing tools to create your own backgrounds. You can save the comics and publish for everyone to see or you can publish privately. If you publish for anybody to see then anybody can comment. That was the only problem with this programme were the comments as they could be inappropriate for children. Some of the cartoons made by other people were a little dodgy as well.
The actual editing page is fine but the main home page changes all the time so you are never sure what is going to pop up. But it is still a worthwhile site to use with careful monitoring. Particularly for younger children I would set up the editing page for them, then there is no need for them to see the home page.
There is no download feature which is a shame as it would be great to download the comic and print it whole screen. But there are always ways around this, you can print out the page when it is in View mode, cut out the comic and glue on to other paper. Or you can take a screen capture (Windows: press the Print Screen button on your keyboard, open Paint, Press Ctrl V and then use the square selector tool to crop the area you need. Copy paste that piece into the Wordprocessor of your choice) Mac Users press Shift, Ctrl, Option and 4, click and drag around the comic, paste into your wordprocessor page.
Again this is another great interactive writing motivating tool.

Motivating Writing

Kerpoof is a great piece of software that you can use to motivate










children's writing. It is free, colourful and interactive.
Make a Picture - choose a background and make a picture using the graphics provided, use the text button to add text to the page. Print the page out as full A4 or as a card. You can also choose to print it out in full colour or as a colouring book page.

Make a Movie option allows you to create a movie with moving objects. There are 7 different story lines to pick from, several scene pages and a limited amount of graphics for each page. Choose from the animation list to animate the objects. Text can be added to the scene as well. It can be saved to an account at Kerpoof or printed.

Make a drawing has drawing tools where you can create a picture and print it out.

Make a card has 8 preset cards including Birthday, Thank you etc. with a limited set of graphics to add.

The Make a Story is my favourite option with 19 different scenes, some graphics, text boxes and text speech bubbles. You can also add more scenes to the story.

This would be a great site for those children who don't have anything to write about as it provides the scenes and graphics, but they get to add the words. They can manipulate the graphics and can add their own drawings to it by using the pen tool. It prints out beautifully as well.

Comic Life and new students

Anne's children have been creating podcasts using Garageband. They have been turning their report writing into news broadcasts. New children to the class have introduced themselves by creating their own comic page in Comic Life. (Images and names have been altered!)