Some of my Favorites - Canva Comics

This week is school vacation week here in Maine. I usually take this week off to go ice fishing on Moosehead Lake. Unfortunately, that's not happening this year. Instead I'll be "staycationing" and working on some projects around home. While on my staycation I'll be sharing some of my personal favorite tools. Canva's release of new comics templates was one of my favorite new things in the fall of 2020. 

Canva's comic gallery contains templates for making comics in a variety of layouts and formats. All of the templates can be customized to your heart's content. 

If you are a current Canva for Education user, you may already know that your students can now collaborate online on any graphics. That's just one of the many good features available when making comics in Canva. In this video I demonstrate how to create comics in Canva and outline five key features of creating comics in Canva. 

Five Key Features of Making Comics in Canva

• Online, real-time collaboration on comic strips. 
• Customize hundreds of pieces of artwork/ drawings/ clip art. 
• Customize the size, spacing, and number of frames per comic. 
• Publish comics as stand-alone websites. 
• Publish comics as PDFs and images. 

Applications for Education

In my Practical Ed Tech Newsletter I outlined five ideas for incorporating comic strip creation into your classroom. Those ideas included illustrating vocabulary words, illustrating favorite stories, creating timelines, making digital greeting cards, and illustrating original writing.

Some of my Favorites - Knowt!

This week is school vacation week here in Maine. I usually take this week off to go ice fishing on Moosehead Lake. Unfortunately, that's not happening this year. Instead I'll be "staycationing" and working on some projects around home. While on my staycation I'll be sharing some of my personal favorite tools. Knowt is one of my favorite new tools of the last 18 months.

Knowt is a free service for turning documents into flashcards, quizzes, and other review activities. When it was initially launched it was created for individual use. Since then Knowt developed a teacher platform that you can use to develop activities to directly share with your students. 

I made a short video overview of how Knowt's teacher platform works. Here are some highlights of the Knowt platform to note before watching my video. 

• You can create online classrooms for your students to join. It is possible to import Google Classroom rosters. 
• Knowt will generate flashcards based on the documents that you create or import (I just copied and pasted a Google Doc into Knowt). 
• Knowt will generate quizzes based on your documents. 
• Quiz question formats include multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, matching, true/false, and sequencing. 
• Quizzes can be graded or ungraded activities. 

Here's my short video overview of Knowt's free teacher platform. 

Some of My Favorites - MIT App Inventor

This week is school vacation week here in Maine. I usually take this week off to go ice fishing on Moosehead Lake. Unfortunately, that's not happening this year. Instead I'll be "staycationing" and working on some projects around home. While on my staycation I'll be sharing some of my personal favorite tools. The first is the MIT App Inventor. 

The MIT App Inventor is a free app development tool that has been available for free for the last decade. It's a great tool to use to introduce students to some programming concepts while letting develop apps that they can actually use on their phones. While it might seem complicated at first glance, after they have mastered a few basic concepts students can create some amazing applications through the MIT App Inventor. 

This morning I used part of my snow day to create a video tutorial on how to create your first Android application through the MIT App Inventor. Watch the video then try making your first app. Or watch the video in one tab while following my instructions with App Inventor open in another tab.