Make Beliefs Comix is a multilingual comic strip creation service that I've featured a few times in the past. Through Make Beliefs Comix students can create comic strips online without needing to register on the site. Make Beliefs Comix also provides teachers with a wealth of printable templates to use in classrooms that do not have enough computers or tablets for every student to use. In the video embedded below I provide an overview of how to create comic strips on Make Beliefs Comix.
Applications for Education Make Beliefs Comix and other services like it provide students with a fun and familiar format for creative writing. Sometimes a little visual prompt provided by a gallery of cartoon characters can inspire students to start writing a story.
This is a guest post from Beth Holland (@brholland) of EdTechTeacher - an advertiser on this site.
VideoNot.es allows students to take notes while watching videos. This tool is fantastic in a flipped, blended, or online classroom as students can have their typed notes automatically time-stamped to the video. Because VideoNot.es can be tied to a Google Drive account, all notes can also be saved and shared with others.
As described in previous posts on this site, VideoNot.es works with YouTube, Vimeo, Coursera, Udacity, Khan Academy, and EdX videos. However, for many schools, these are not sufficient options because of content filtering, and teachers have always asked if it could be possible for students to take notes on videos shared through Drive. Until last week, my answer had been “no.” But now, thanks to one of my EdTechTeacher Summer Workshop participants - Bill Melville (@bmelvillehwrhs) from Hamilton Wenham Regional High School - there is a solution. By manually changing the URL, students can now take notes on Google Drive videos! The screencast below walks through this process.
Thanks again to Bill for this discovery!
To learn more about working with Google Apps and Web Tools, EdTechTeacher provides FREE resources on their website.
Last week I presented three webinars on behalf of Simple K12 (the recordings will be available later this week). The third of those webinars was all about Google Drive Add-ons and Chrome extensions for teachers. If you couldn't attend the live webinar, you can still grab the handout here or view it as embedded below.
This post comes from the "in case you missed it department." Last week the Associated Press announced the publication of more than one million minutes of archival footage on YouTube. That footage is being published in collaboration with British Movietone. A sample playlist is embedded below.
Applications for Education
Much of the footage in the AP and British Movietone archives is under two minutes. The short clips could be good as supporting material to add to a reference page for students. In general, students will need the larger historical context in order to appreciate the video clips.
Last week ClassDojo introduced the option to create student groups within your ClassDojo classrooms. This morning I received an email from someone who was curious about how to change the student avatar pictures within ClassDojo. That's a question that I often receive in my workshops too. To answer that question I created the short video that you see embedded below.
