Software review

I have spent some time today with Professor Garfield. He is an interesting little dude that has some possibilities for classroom use. Professor Garfield is a free web site that has educational content for classroom and home use. There is a teacher’s lounge where they have lesson plans, printables and other information for parents and teachers.

This site has drill and practice games that students can play to reinforce concepts in social studies, math, science and reading. There are also areas to learn about creating music and art. The one are where student’s get the chance to create content is in the comic labs. They can choose from many different pictures and element to put in their strips and then they write the stories in the comics. This could be done individually or in small groups. The strips can then be saved as a jpg file or printed out.

Not the most engaging program, mostly just point and click but there are questions in the games that will make kids use skills they have learned in the classroom.

This program has reviews and content standards available on the teacher page.

Here is a sample of the types of strips that can be made, this one took me about 5 minutes. It was fun to work with and easy to move through the steps to create the comic. There is a tutorial at the beginning but I skipped that and went right into creating.

I think the only part that could be used in a lesson plan would be the comic strip creator, but the other areas are fun for drill and practice options.

The URL for this site is: http://www.professorgarfield.org/ The image above is the Professor Garfield comic creator page.