Comic strips, timelines with pictures and graphic running records are three strategies I employ as a special educator, but as a reading teacher, their value is endless. The incorporation of pictures with any(decontextualized) text is really helpful to increase understanding.

This is a really neat program that combines students computer skills and also boosts the confidence of students who do not participate in graphic components when they feel they can't draw:

Comic Life is an award winning application for creating not just comics (obviously), but also annotated images, dynamic photo albums, greeting cards, scrap books, story books, and instruction guides and brochures. In the classroom, it is an excellent tool for creating reports of almost any kind. Comic Life allows you to create page layouts with boxes for images and text. Styles can be applied to create just about any type of ‘feel’ for your document. Captions can be created with tails in order to have thought balloons, speech boxes or just additional annotations. Filters are available to turn your digital images into a variety of hand drawn looking graphics to enhance the comic appearance of your work.

For schools that do not have the right hardware or infinite resources, there are so many artistic elements to standard applications like Word to create the necessary elements. In the event there are NO computers available, using the thought and speaking bubbles, preset frames and generic characters to create one's own comic features is just as helpful. Cutting and pasting, old school. Teachers too often write a product off because they cannot foresee purchasing 200 licenses or having enough equipment. Maybe we should start adapting to meet our own technological needs, while creating similar engagement.

Other resources I have been given as a history teacher include the work of Larry Gonick. These are not the shiny new manga type comics, and I know I'm only drawn to them because in my heart I love history, but they are an interesting take. In these cases, the comics had been supplemental.

In my literature classes, when I worked with self-contained special education students, I used graphic novels (notice the language change, as I am seeing my obvious judgment) to teach the classics. I wanted the students to feel pride in their reading, as many of their peers read texts at a higher level. Leveled and abridged texts just weren't the same because the stories were lacking their "classic" qualities, and more often than not, edges of their plotlines. Worse, when you take the sideplots and descriptive language out of many texts we use in class, the readings become even more decontextualized and insultingly simple. My students loved reading Metamorphosis because the text made more sense with the original language and the supplement of pictures. The text was a perfect match for a graphic novel and the ease of reading allowed the students to discuss the deeper issues, which are usually lost in comprehension strategies when reading a dulled abridged text.

When students do not understand, I encourage them in both literature and core content area classes to take notes in the form of pictures in the margins of their texts. Students with severe comprehension difficulties are often helped by summarizing chunks of text in pieces and drawing quick pictures of the important elements of their reading. Upon "rereading" the text (and their pictures), students have built up their visualization of the text, demonstrated the use of their prior knowledge in their depictions of the content of the reading and the inferences they have made, as well provided themselves a cheatsheet of the story that is as easy for them to read as scanning would be for a student without reading difficulties.

Differentiated Instruction and Multiple Intelligences theories promote these kinds of uses of graphic novels, comics, and pictures throughout instruction to meet the needs of different types of learners. Using these resources as texts (differentiating the content), expecting learners to produce these media for assessment (differentiating the product), and incorporating these media as reading strategies (differentiating the process) are key elements for reaching all learners. Additionally, these media allow for greater variation to meet content needs, readiness levels, student interest and modalities, also critical in the need to differentiate.

The philosophical foundation is very rarely related to technology and literacy, but rather on cognitive demands or learning profile information, as if how students learn is divorced from the technology and literacy experiences they have had in their lives outside of the classroom. It will interesting to see how to create something more complete when incorporating the experiential learning that is a contribution of culture and lifestyle, or to see how extending something that may already being do that do so more completely when teachers become cognizant of the elements outside the classroom.