Six Kingdom Posters Finished

Yesterday I finished up the website with the completed Six Kingdoms Posters the 7th grade students made in Comic Life. Last week, I previewed a little bit about this project, which the students had a great time with! They did a little bit of research of some of the kingdoms and used their recall skills from class lectures with others. They then did an image search to find images that best represented each kingdom. I had the students use Safari on our macbooks to send their images straight to iphoto, which then automatically came up in their Comic Life library. After that was completed, students then went into Comic Life, found a template to add to their page, and then dragged their images from the library to each box. They then added speaking bubbles with two facts about each kingdom. They labeled the kingdoms, added a title and their name and then were allowed to do special effects, colors, fonts, background, shadows, etc.

This was one of the best projects I've done and I'm really happy with the results. However, there are a few things I learned from this project.

1) Have students put their name on it first. For some reason, we had a hard time getting student to put their names on their posters.
2) No matter how many times we told the students to put their information on their poster first, then look at the effects, we still had students who didn't finish because they were changing all the effects. I would hate to do this, because I want students to learn time management and be responsible for getting their own work done on time, but maybe next time I should break this up into two parts. In the first part, students have a checklist (which they had) and they must show us everything is checked off before they can move onto the effects. I saw some great posters with lots of variety and they would have been awesome--had they been finished. There were also other students who went beyond what we asked and put in whole paragraphs about each kingdom or had additional "comic" comments after the information had been added. They were fun to read as well as informational.
3) I would do this type of project again. It took the students about a period and a half to create their posters, but they won't be forgetting this assignment anytime soon.