Back to the Drawing Board: Comic Relief with Knights and Arrows

I was attending a workshop about ESL writing activities and saw this really neat full-page comic strip activity where the students had to fill in the word bubbles with narrative or dialogue. The comic depicted a bank robbery and an ensuing police investigation, and the accompanying lesson had vocabulary on phrasal verbs. My coworkers and I had to come up with dialogue to fill in the boxes, and instantly, it was like we were little kids playing cops and robbers:
"THIS IS A STICK UP!"
"GET DOWN!"
"The robbers ran away with the money!"
"The cops tried to find out where the robbers were hiding out!"

I started thinking it would be cool to have more of these kinds of activities, so I searched online and sadly found nothing that wasn't either violating copyright or as intricate as the comic I saw in the workshop.

So I started sketching out some ideas myself, and while I'm an okay artist, it takes me a long time from start to finish. Then I thought about my friend Zac from high school and his ability to draw really great art in a very short time, and the wheels in my head started turning: What if we teamed up? He'd make the drawings and I'd make the lesson plans? 

I got a hold of him and pitched the idea to him, and now we're working on some projects together! (I'm really geeked about it since back in the day the two of us almost got started writing a comic book together and even attending a workshop up in Battle Creek about it, but we got so busy that it just got put on the back burner indefinitely).

He sent me a rough sketch of an idea he had and then we talked about ways to edit one of the individual cells and I thought it'd be cool to talk about it over a Google Drawing since we live in different cities:

Maybe it's so fun because it's a throwback to those times when you were a kid and you'd sit down next to a giant piece of paper with a pal and just draw, but there's something about collaborating on the same digital space in real-time that brings out that inner child, that person who wants to play, and goof off, and be ridiculous. It was the same feeling I got when I was sitting in that workshop looking over that comic strip with my coworkers and coming up with a story together, and it's the same feeling I observe in my students when I use this kind of technology in the classroom: Students get so animated, and I always have to let them have a couple minutes in the beginning to "get their wiggles out" and delete or rewrite each other's sentences and cause digital mischief before they get down to work. Whatever it is, it's fun and it's the biggest reason I repeat activities like this in the classroom each semester.

In any case, keep your eye out for more drawings and lesson plans to go with them once we're ready to upload them. I plan on having a section on the site for materials to download.

Are there any fun things you're doing with collaborative technology? I'd love to hear about them, so please feel free to write about them in the comments below.

Have a good one, and good luck out there!

-Bill