hello everyone. We are back, and we are here every Tuesday. Chrissy and Tanner from Common Sense Education coming to you with EdTech reviews of all ilks, trying to give you things you can use in your classroom. Today, Tanner's going to tell us about a little something. And what is that little something, Tanner? It's a little something that's been around for a long something. It's a site called make beliefs comics.com. As is our trend here, this is a completely free site, so you might want to type that into your browser and visit it while we're talking about it. Easy to sign in and get going with, with no cost whatsoever. Let's take a look at this thing here. This is a site that we gave three stars, and it's an endearing three stars. It's not. This isn't a tool that I would say is flawless, but it is a tool that I think will capture the hearts of some. We rate it for grades three through eight. As I said, it's totally

free and it is a comics creation site which teachers you know it is a tried and true teaching technique especially when we're talking about ela and literacy skills right um creating comics is a fun way to embed those skills in creative activities now here's the thing about this site it's been around for a while it has a ton of content and the person behind this bill zimmerman i he's a comics artist he's a creative person and he just likes throwing everything at you and he's been adding to the site for 15 years and there's a lot going on here you can get lost in menus they uh there is so much here and it's not the best organized site i would say but you will find things to use and i would recommend diving in directly into comics creation um so there's this big call out here once you sign in this begin now i would click there and that'll kind of show you the basic tool here um you know you can create multi-paneled comic strips

and then you go down here, and you can add in from these menus. Characters, you can use this menu to then kind of move around, flip your characters, concerned about that character just based on his facial expression. Yeah, there's some really, there's an incredible variety of things here. Um. [Music] You can kind of just drag and drop, uh, characters in. If that's there, we go, and you kind of have to like, it's, it's not necessarily intuitive, but it's easy to use. You kind of have to flick through here, and then do this, and then click on here, and then you can do that and add in characters. You can add in emojis, balloons, um, that you can then type in, uh, but as you can see, like, it's, it's gonna take some, some work from students to, to kind of learn the particular logic of this program and get it working exactly as it needs to, um, but the good news is there's just an endless variety, seemingly, of things to customize.

these comics with [Music]. Now you can, of course, make many different panels here. Um, you know, tell stories sequentially. You can also, a newer feature they have is you can add audio to each. So you can record, you know, this thing. This is great for accessibility. You can record narration from each for each of your panels. The thing is, I noticed once you do this, you can't then remove it. Once you add in recording to a panel, it's stuck there. This is just one of the many quirks of Make Beliefs Comics. So it's, it's a nice feature, but I couldn't find any way to, like, because I was like, Oh, let me play around with this, and it's like, Well, I'm locked in for eternity. But it's easy enough to click start over, erase that, start over. You can save your comics once you're done with them, and you'll have a little thing here that you can pull up, you know, your old strips with. Um, you can print and share your comics, um, so you can physically print them out, hand them in.

you know, have students hand them in. You can save them as a PDF if you want. You can also have your students email those comics, you know, so this helps with assessment and grading and that kind of thing. They've also got, um, what are called comic starters. And there's also a menu here of them. They're embedded all over the place in these things, but I find these pretty handy and they're often very topical, um, and updated. It seems like Bill Zimmerman is constantly revisiting this site. So here's, you know, stuff about the coronavirus. And what these do is if you click through, they then offer a sort of a writing prompt that students can then add comics to and respond to, print them out, turn them in. Sort of a neat way to just do a quick activity with the comic strips. Um, there's also a massive library of printables on every possible topic. You know, there's a big focus here on SEL. So here's a little section on grief, loss, and sadness. And these are downloadable printable things that

students can then draw on if you want to do a totally offline kind of activity. [Music] I'm going to stop there. There's much more, um, and I know the last time we updated this site, this was a big effort. There's English learner activities, there's special needs activities, and some of these sections also have reflections from teachers or parents who talk about how they've used the site, which is kind of a neat little way of handling this. Um, that explains, you know, how these, um, tools may have particular affordances for different populations. Um, there's also, of course, translation here as well that translates, you know, the whole site automatically in all these languages. There's just, there's a lot there, um, but I'm gonna stop there and just say that this is a thing people should check out. It's free. I know a lot of teachers use comics creation activities to classroom, and this may confuse you, but I think it'll charm you along the way, and you'll find something to use with your students. I, I love that there are sel

prompts in there because that's a great entry point for kids. That probably feels a lot less threatening than, Let's sit and talk about how we're feeling. Um, and it seems like it's mostly a storytelling vehicle, a creative vehicle that doesn't involve a lot of art unless you're using the printables. Um, that's a great point. That's something that our reviewer brought up in the review was that unlike, um, you know, some other tools or if you're going to do these activities offline, students can't create their own art, which could be seen as a downside, but it's also just, you know, for students that may not have those skills or may not have the motor skills to do sophisticated drawing and comic creation, it allows them just to click and be on their way in terms of storytelling. Um, so you know, depending on what your use case is, it could be a benefit, could be a drawback, but yeah, it's all just click-based unless you use the printables, and then there is an opportunity there to do your own.

expressive drawing. Nice! All right, well, there's another great free tool for you to explore. Again, we're here every Tuesday. We're coming back at you, and uh, thanks for joining us. Tell your friends, and we'll see you soon.

Make Beliefs Comix Is One of Our Favorite Comic Strip Creation Tools and It’s Free

Make Beliefs Comix Is One of Our Favorite Comic Strip Creation Tools and It’s Free