Comic Creator

Comic Creator invites students to create their own comic strip. Characters and props and backgrounds are a bit limited, but not a bad start. They also have resource lessons for various grade levels from K-12.

Completed cartoon cannot be saved, but can be "printed" either on actual paper or as a PDF document. [With Macintosh this is a standard "print as pdf" operation; with Windows, I believe you need a print as pdf plugin. There are several free ones out there.]

Animation Tool

"Pencil is an animation/drawing software for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. It lets you create traditional hand-drawn animation (cartoon) using both bitmap and vector graphics. Pencil is FREE and open source." It's a simple program, complete with a user's manual that does traditional 2-D animation. Take a look at the gallery to see some examples.

Copyright Friendly Clip Art

While the GVC contest encourages original art and photos, there are some cases where you just NEED to find a piece of clip art. Here are some sources:

• Pics4Learning - A library of images donated by students, teachers, photographers... anyone with a picture to share. Permission to use AND citation information right under the picture!
• WPClipart - All images are public domain. While originally created for Word Processing and printing, they work well as web images.
• Wikimedia Commons - Many thousands of images. Scroll down under full sized image to see the particular licensing for this particular image. Almost all require attribution; some, but only a few do not allow derivative works (which means you can't edit the picture.)
• Ookaboo - Creative commons site for finding great (free) images for class work.
  
• Find Icons -  Nice site for free icons.