Using Comics to Tell Anecdotes: Not a Completely Successful Experiment, but Still Worth It

In this entry I am going to focus on process writing, and, more specifically, on using comics to make students aware of the potential of technologies for writing. 
Based on the contents of the course, I devised a task whose learning objective was to be able to narrate a personal anecdote as established in the course syllabus for B2.1 corresponding to the second term. In this case, after narrating anecdotes orally, I wanted students to consolidate the vocabulary they had learnt and memorize the structure and stages of an anecdote using the comic format.
In order to do this, I devised a voluntary task using pixton. As the finished product was individual, they worked individually. However, students had worked previously in class in pairs and small groups as follows: they were given a card and had to tell an anecdote related to the topic of the card ( a trip, a famous person, an injury..).The rest of students in the group had to guess if the anecdote was real or imagined and made suggestions to improve it.
 In most cases it was impossible for them to relate to a real event, so they had to invent one and then transfer it to the comic. In the cases the anecdote was real, they had to embellish it a bit too, using their imagination and adapting it to the limitations of their use of language. I also noticed that some were frustrated because they had errors in the bubbles they could not correct and told me. These students do not usually notice their errors when they write other types of texts, which tells me this tool is good to promote self-assessment.

After receiving the comics, I showed the finished products in class as if it was a virtual exhibition and we voted the best one based on the following criteria: story, design, and use of language. The winner got some chocolates I had bought in Ireland and a diploma.

After looking at the results and asking students, I can tell they enjoyed using their imagination and seeing their stories in a graphic format. They had a lot of fun creating their characters and the situations too. 

However, some of them were not very good at computers and did not want to carry out the activity. The fact that they had to do it at home was also a problem because some of them said they do not have time and some others stated that they joined this modality and not the blended modality precisely because they did not want to use computers or other gadgets at home for too long. That is why I made the activity optional, as I could not use one computer for everybody in the classroom due to lack of laptops, lack of sockets and no ICT room in my school. Also, we used pixton because the aesthetics was more appropriate for them but they complained the free version did not allow for many features. I tried to create a virtual classroom on Pixton to which invite my students and even though I watched the tutorials, it was impossible, the links I sent them did not work. Therefore, I asked them to do them separately and send me the sharing link. Many of them did not know how to share the content and sent photos or screenshots, which made my work as a curator quite hard.

This is the reason why I think now it would have been better to work on the comic in groups  and in class, but seeing the characteristics of my students and of the school I think I will not be able to change it. Perhaps students of the blended modality (semipresencial) will be more skilled when it comes to working with a computer unsupervised...I'll try it with them next time!
To summarise, the activity was interesting and fun for some of them, but it could have been much easier had my students been more into technologies and the free version of the app more user-friendly.

Here you can see an example and there is another one below.