I have become obsessed with AI over the last year and it has reignited my passion of computer programming, which was my original qualification before I became a teacher. However, I’m aware that some of the stuff I’ve been playing around with does require a level of coding knowledge so I thought I’d share a really simple way of using AI tools to create a 6-panel comic strip. All you need is Canva (which is free for educators) and you might want to use a good AI image generator. Canva does have one but I prefer Dall.E so I used that instead.
I wanted to create a comic strip that taught a lesson so I decided to go with the story of Rosa Parks, the civil rights activist who is most famous in Ireland, at least, for refusing to leave her seat on a bus because of the colour of her skin. I think most people in Ireland know the story fairly well.
I’m no artist and AI allows me to generate original art and I wanted to create a comic strip that drew inspiration from the comics I used to read, i.e. The Beano, Dandy and so on. However, I needed a modern feel too. Essentially, I needed an image that didn’t vary very much so I thought a typical classroom would be a good choice. I wanted to ensure the classroom represented a typical Irish classroom so I went to ChatGPT to ask for the following:
Make a primary classroom with 30 children sitting in different groups. The children are mostly ethnically white-Irish but there are about 5 children from different ethnicities in the room. The teacher is white-Irish. There is an Interactive screen on the wall, which should be blank.
After a couple of attampts where some tweaking was needed, (it produced an image with 3 teachers, then the teacher didn’t look quite right, then the children weren’t ethnically different, etc.), but eventually we got our image!
It’s a good first lesson to learn for a class. The first image you get may not be right and you might spend some time tweaking it. I wanted a second image of a close up of the teacher but no matter what I tried, I couldn’t get an image to match the teacher in the first picture.
It also taught me that we have to be careful with our prompts. The last image is slightly cropped because it would be totally inappropriate for a primary school child. ChatGPT isn’t beyond gutter thinking. However, as you can see the images were close but not close enough so I had a different plan and that was to simply zoom in on the top right of the first picture to create a new image from the original image.
The next step was to use Canva to create a comic strip and it couldn’t have been much easier. Canva comes with a whole load of templates and I simply had to search for comic strip templates and I easily found one to suit the job.
The first slide contains a basic 6-panel template and the second slide contains a number of speech and thought bubbles. It’s everything you need. All I needed to do was fill in the boxes.
Simply upload the image and resize it to fit into the box. I added the panel to describe where we were as you can see in panel 1. I also added an image to the interactive screen.
After that, I wanted to zoom in on the teacher. In Canva, this is easy to do. Simply double-click on the image and this allows you to “crop” the image so I zoomed in on the teacher. I left space on the left so I could add the speech bubbles to tell the story of Rosa Parks. I also left some of the screen visible so I could show a visual of the story.
After that, it was rinse and repeat for the next few slides. I wanted the story to be interrupted by a bell going off to signal the end of class so simply layered on another bubble with a picture of a bell. I then zoomed out. It was time for the final panel.
A good comic strip will end with a twist or surprise or a punchline so what was I going to do? Well, it wouldn’t be my blog if I didn’t make a point about the education system so here it is in all its glory!
I tried to add in a couple of details that were important. For example, the interactive screen in panel 5 says NO SEGREGATION but look at panel 6 and see the difference. Although I didn’t deliberately add this, as it was AI-generated, I loved how the picture above the teacher showed two children with different skin-tones beside each other. I’m also happy that the teacher’s facial expression doesn’t change because she didn’t see the irony of what she was saying in the final panel.
Obviously the purpose of showing you this is to show you how easy it is to create a comic strip using AI and Canva. Canva allows for several different types of panels and you don’t have to use AI at all if you don’t want to as Canva has a huge catalogue of images that can be used.
I hope you enjoyed this post. I thought it was better to make an article rather than a video for this one as I sometimes find How-To Videos difficult to follow. However, I’m happy to make one if you wish! Just comment and I’ll take it from there
