Need

Literacy has become a problem in many schools and teachers are looking for news ways to teach students, that will be stimulating and fun, while skill-building at the same time. Web comic books are an instructional medium that gives children the chance to use material from their own lives to conceive, write, and illustrate stories. Web comic books also offer a dynamic way to teach elements of fiction that are required in many schools.

Why Web Comics

With the advent of web technology, web comic books have appeared as a new, promising, instructional medium. Web Comics is a plurimedia medium that combines text and imagery as well as hypermedia and streaming elements. Web comics can be interactive means for studying as well as for self-assessment. Children having read some pages of the web comic book, could be asked to respond to an online assessment test, e.g. a test that has the form of unfinished dialogues among the characters. Web comics can offer scaffolding to difficult scientific disciplines and concepts.

It is believed that they can be an effective instructional medium especially for reluctant readers and poor students. Their use in education is based on the Clark’s & Paivio’s (1991) dual coding theory, which supports the importance of imagery and narration in cognitive operations. A few tools, in prototype versions, have recently appeared which allow teachers and students to create web comics. Examples of these tools are Web Comic Book Creator from ITisArt, CoSy Comic Strip Creator and Make Beliefs Comix.

WP	Deliverable Name
WP1	State of the Art Comics in Education
WP2	Teacher training material about the educational use of Web Comics & Training Events
WP3	An evaluation report about the user trials
WP5	Dissemination Plan for EduComics
WP5	EduComics Dissemination Report