Just used Chogger in class today. Students are reading Orwell's 1984, and I figured a good stick figure comic would be a great way to review the key points.

Chogger appears to be a great tool. You can quickly create whatever kind of comic panel you want, with as many or as few panels as you desire. It has the option if importing images or drawing them. And you can layer in different images, placing them in front or behind one another.

We ended up running into a few issues in the 2 classes I used it in: moving an image from the image collection into a panel led to lots of resizing issues that were pretty difficult to overcome. In addition, it seemed that the Chogger server got overloaded with 12 different machines trying to access it from the router. (I grant that the network at my school is not the greatest, but it happened in 2 different classrooms at different times in the day.)

We ended up problem solving by taking a screen-shot of the mostly completed comics, and then cropping them once they were pasted into a Google Doc.

It should be noted that we were using the FREE anonymous version, so perhaps with creating a user account things improve.

I will give it a couple months to see if things improve and try it again before I completely write it off. It is a great concept, and one of the best/easiest comic creators I have come across, if it actually works the way it appears to be designed to.

Hour of Code is an initiative of CSEducation, in partnership with Code.org, to get coding into classrooms. The initiative is simple: get kids to code for 1 hour next week during "Computer Science Education Week" December 9-13. To do this, the two have worked together (with what appears to by Rovio, famously the creator of Angry Birds) to create a simple beginner tutorial system to introduce kids to coding.

The tutorial appears to be built around Google's Blockly, and at first blush seems to be essentially guided tour of Scratch. After a few minutes playing around, I was so skeptical of its value in anything above a third grade, that I took it home and tried it out on my first grader. I had previously shown him Daisy the Dinosaur and Cargo Bot, neither of which did anything for him. Imagine my surprise, though, when he got into it. And I mean into it! He passed up on dessert and playing on the Wii because he wanted to keep doing it. (I'm sure the Angry Birds theme helped!) He needed a little help, but not much, and I thought, yep, suspicions confirmed, great for the younger crowd, but not ideal for a true intro for most kids. 

Then, when it was time to turn it off, I accidentally ended up in the main menu of challenges and was blown away! My son had reached level 7 of what it shows to be twenty, in about 15 minutes. I figured that was all there was. Once I was in the main menu, I could see exactly what this game/tutorial had going for it.

Hour of Code is a solidly put together piece of software, comprising 20 total levels, most with a significant number of sub-levels that runs through a substantial number of the underlying principals of code theory, from if and if/else, to while to functions with parameters. In addition, the game play/learning is a repetitive looping technique, where they practice a skill several times to get comfortable on it, are then asked to use that skill and incorporate it with a new skill that they are learning, and then come back to this first foundational skill, and are asked to expand upon it. There is quite literally something in here for everyone. I highly recommend getting this into the hands of your students, even if it has nothing to do with your subject area; find any excuse. Let it open the door and they can take it where they want to from there.

In addition, after you complete the Hour of Code tutorial, you can go back and learn things like JavaScript and Python from the other tutorials they have put together (or, if your students are advanced, they could just start there).

"The great thing about young children is that they do not know yet know what they cannot do"

Po Bronson - NurtureShock