McKenzie’s Blog

Peer Review 

McKenzie: Thank you for sharing your Comic Life project with me. Let me just start by saying “Wow”, I am so impressed with how it turned out. Your introduction was excellent….you mentioned the four key components of the marketing mix and set the tone for the rest of the presentation. The content of each page is superior. You have mixed in highly appropriate pictures with just enough text to understand exactly what the message is supposed to be. Text is clear and concise, and the presentation progresses in a logical order. The conclusion is fantastic, it really drives home the point that if you want to get your product in the hands of your customers, you had better pay attention to the four P’s. All of your color and font choices fit the overall presentation very well. Overall this is a fantastic comic book. I truly believe that if you used this in a high school classroom, the students would be enthusiastic about learning. Very well done :) 

Brian H 

Project Description 

This project can be used in a high school business class when introducing the four Ps of the marketing mix (product, price, place and promotion). I am currently observing in a middle school mathematics classroom, but will be doing my student teaching in the fall in a high school business classroom. I felt that for this particular assignment, to utilize visual representation, choosing a topic in marketing was most logical. I attempted to minimize text and to choose images that represent each area of the marketing mix in detail. I could print the comic book pages out for the students as a memorable visual illustration of the information I am teaching. As they attempt to recall the information for use in future lessons or tests, they can recall the comic book pages to stimulate their memory and remember the data. 

Since there are no benchmarks in a career related learning subject such as business, I referred to the Oregon Skill Set for an appropriate standard for the project. This project was designed to meet the Industry-Based Knowledge and Skill MKZ01.01: Integrate social-studies skills into marketing, sales and service to better understand customers and the economic environment in which they function. 

Assimilation and/or accommodation 

I have used Power Point in the past, so I was interested in exploring something new. The Comic Life program is very new to me so this assignment was very much cognitive accommodation. I did experience some assimilation in that I have familiarity with layout and design. I got to experiment with those elements in a completely new context with the comic program. I spent a lot of time getting acquainted with the program and its features. I experimented with changing the pictures to look more comic-like, adjusting colors, adding text bubbles and titling. I used my prior knowledge of color schemes, contrast and organization to make the pages interesting, yet easy to follow. I gathered pictures from the internet and arranged them to best describe the key points of my lesson. 

I really enjoyed exploring this new program and was very happy with the result. I would actually love to spend more time getting to know more of what the program can do. I think it would be a very interesting way to represent lessons from time to time and would definitely capture the students attention and interest.