Ashfield Park is a mixed primary school in Ross-on-Wye. We are a large school with approx 360 pupils on roll. Although proving useful across the primary ages ranges, I have been using Comic Life with a class of Year Four pupils for several months and have been astounded by the sheer number of opportunities for using it in the classroom. The first thing that struck me was just how intuitive it is to use, the templates to get started are immediately visible and easily customisable. With a simple drag and drop system, each feature is easy to use meaning that even less confident children were able to see dramatic results quickly. I also liked how the children were able to get to images stored on the computer without ever leaving the program by using the "explorer" feature. This meant that they didn't have to waste time or follow complicated instructions for importing their images from another location as can be an issue with other programs we use in the classroom. My Year Four class required little guidance when using Comic Life for the first time as each aspect of its design is well thought through, resulting in outcomes that are visually stunning but easy to achieve, even for young children. For us, one of the main uses has been in the sequencing of ideas, Children were able to use Comic Life to help them plan out a play script which they later turned into a film. They took photographs of the key parts of their story and added speech bubbles to show what each character would say. They were even able to add images of special effects that would be added at the film editing stage to show them where to stand when filming. Using Comic Life enabled the children to engage in the task in a way that they could not have done without using the program. In addition, we have also found comic life to be a very valuable tool when completing the "Instructions" genre of our Literacy work. The ability to quickly sequence images, adding text to explain each step provided a logical template for creating instructional leaflets. However, it is not just in Literacy that Comic Life has been of benefit - it has numerous possibilities across the curriculum, including (but not limited to) creating visual dictionaries or simple stories in a foreign language, designing a guide to a place of worship or retelling of a story studied in RE, timelines of famous people or events in history, recounting a school visit, recording ideas from PSHE or SEAL lessons and creating posters or displays by using Comic Life as a desktop publisher I believe that Comic Life provides excellent value for money considering the impact that it can have on teaching and learning in the classroom across so many different subjects. It's versatility, ease of use and perhaps most importantly to the children, its "fun factor" combine to make it a unique and exciting way to engage the children using ICT.

Deborah Dijalis - ICT Co-ordinator - Ashfield Park Primary School