Beyond School

If I’m sharing a lot of student bloggers on Beyond School lately, it’s because we only launched our high school-wide blogging program back in mid-January. Two short months later, I’m seeing sparks of genius here and there.

Here’s another one: A 30-page Comic Life comic book from Beatrice. I featured it in my presentation at the Apple Distinguished Educator Institute in Bangkok back in December (video here), but at that time, it was locked in a private class Ning. With the help of my Twitter network – particularly Scott Meech in Chicago and Adrian Bruce in northern New South Wales, Australia – I was able to find a WordPress plugin that creates full-screen slideshows of Flickr photo sets. Beatrice exported her Comic Life pages as jpegs, uploaded them to Flickr as a set, and embedded the set as a slideshow in this post on her blog. I can’t recommend the comic highly enough: it’s a satire on the GPA mania of parents and schools, and its destructive effects on parents and children alike. Both the plot and the graphic design – not to mention the imagination – are first-rate. And this girl is a mere 15.

Here are a couple teaser shots. Follow this link to the full book, and also browse Beatrice’s showcase of paintings and photoshop illustrations for a glimpse of the non-verbal potential of student blogging. Beatrice’s dominant intelligence, she tells me, is visual. And she gets how ideal blogs can be to showcase her portfolio.

Be sure to leave her a comment. And by the way, this copyrighted material is used by permission from the artist.

I’m so glad we aren’t using the blogs as prescriptive homework assignments. The things we discover about these individuals we lump into the “student” label can be wonderfully surprising, when they have the freedom to post what they choose.

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