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Welcome to EdTech Tuesday, I'm Jennifer Gibson. And I'm Rich Dixon. Today we're going to look
at something that's a little unique, not that unique but a little different. This has a
website and an app? It does, and it's called Make Beliefs Comix. We're going to start by
showing the web-based version first, and then we'll show the free iOS app. Is the web a
fee or is it also free? It's free. You'll see on your screen that there are ads that
are displaying, so the developer used ads in order to pay for this. There is that trade-off
and it's something that you need to be aware of when using this app, that you're not going
to have control over the types of ads that are displayed. That being said - Yes, I'm
concerned, are there education kind of ads, or are they going to be anything inappropriate?
In this particular one, we see a national car manufacturer that's being displayed. I
have not seen anything inappropriate. This site is specifically designed for students;
while I can't guarantee there wouldn't be anything, say, for some vacation rental or
something like that, but we do see in this case that there are ads, and I have yet to
see anything that's inappropriate. The whole concept here behind this is we can create
either a three- or a four-panel comic, and it's a great way to engage students from a
variety of different learning styles and learning needs to be able to do things like summarize
what they've learned, to be able to put words into feelings that they have for those that
are autistic, for example. Let's take a look. We can see here we can enter; there's a number
of different languages, which is great, again especially if you have some second language
learners. Spanish, you can see this. Or you're maybe teaching languages, you might be teaching
Spanish or French or Italian or Portuguese. That's exactly right. I'm going to click Enter
here, and you'll see what comes up is a nice little spread here. I'm going to briefly go
over the interface here, and then we'll switch to the app version and take a look, which
looks almost exactly the same. There's a number of different characters that are here; again,
they're all in comic form. I'm going to pick one right now. You'll see as soon as I click
on that that it shows up here. This first area here is highlighted with red, and if
that's the case, I just tap once on the character and then I can move the character around.
On the left are all of the different controls. I'm in move mode right now. Let's say that
I want to make this guy a little bit bigger. I can do that by clicking once, and you'll
see these other controls come up. I can make him bigger. It looks like it's fairly easy
to use and figure out. Exactly, and then if I have another character (I'm going to enter
another one here), and let's say that I want to make this person or this character here,
I want to bring her to the front or to the back: I can click and move things around.
I can flip the direction of a character, like that. Oh that's nice, so if you want to have
a conversation, they can look at each other. We can also delete something, as well. That's
the basic idea there. There's different talk balloons that I can add inside here, so I
can go ahead and do that. I can move that around, I can click inside here and say, "Sample
text," for example. When you're done, you have the opportunity to share this out. I
noticed that they have objects and scenes and background colors. This looks like a lot
of fun. One of the other things, background colors as you saw, and you can see that if
you want to change it to four-panel, we can do that here. If we want two-panel, we can
also do that there. There are props, so again, from a teacher's standpoint, it's very possible
to set something up like this as a template and then have students write off of that.
I'm thinking easily third grade and up, and I mean up like this could definitely be something
you might use for a political cartoon in high school or some kind of activity, if maybe
you're taking a language like Latin or Spanish and you want to illustrate what's going on
in a conversation. I think with younger kids, they could do that with maybe a buddy system
or an adult partner that's helping out with a center, but I think there's a lot of grade
levels that could be spanned with this. Let's click on Next here. One of the things we can
do is we can go back and we can edit if we want, we can print this out, we can also email
this, so it's very easy to share your work. Let's move over and take a look at the app
version, as well. I'm going to pick up the iPad at this point, and I do want to point
out that, while it's labeled Make Beliefs Comix on the iOS store, it says Make Beliefs
on the iPad. It's really common, we always try to point out the actual app name and then
what it looks like on the iPad, and this one of course has to be shortened so that it can
match the icon. At this point we're looking at version 1.0 of the app. There's a couple,
there's a little gambling kind of ad. Or a game, I'm not really sure, but just as a heads
up, there is an ad, though I do want to highlight that this interface that we just saw with
the website top here looks just the same. There's a couple fewer characters that were
on the website that aren't available here, but pretty much everything else is exactly
the same. I do find that this is very easy to use. One thing I do want to point out is
that on the website itself, there's a tremendous list of application ideas, testimonials from
teachers that have put this into practice with different populations. Let's say you're
working with an autistic child because I reviewed one of the suggestions there. A phenomenal
idea: one of the teachers, what they would do is they would have something set up for
a student, and if a student had a problem communicating their emotions or frustration,
they would have a character scene set up and the student could start to process: A) what
happened, identify what their feelings were, and how they could handle things or do things
differently. So are they asking for teachers to give feedback on the website. There is,
there's an opportunity to do that. It's very collaborative that way and I think there's
a neat resource. We all learn from each other, so being able to have that dialogue around
something is great. Are there any in-app purchases? No, no there's no in-app purchases that I've
come across yet at all. I believe the developers' intent was to keep things free, hence the
ads. The only thing I would say is, with the ads, you could use the lock down so that students
couldn't actually click on that, going into the universal access and locking it. That
would be through your Settings, you'd have to go in there and you could block off that
portion of the screen. The lower half, and then they couldn't click on those ads. They'd
still see the ads, they just couldn't click on those. Another thing to bring up is with
this particular app and this resource in general is that, again, no matter which grade you're
teaching, I think there's a really high level of application. Because it's free, I think
there's a lot of neat opportunities. That's a brief overview there of Make Beliefs Comix.