CLICK ON A COMİX TEMPLATE: MAKE BELIEFS COMIX

  I will introduce a web site which is presented by my two classmates: Makebeliefscomix where children and adults can create their own comic strips.  They can select from 15 fun characters with different moods - happy, sad, angry, worried - and write words for  blank talk and thought balloons to make their characters talk and think.  There also are story ideas and prompts to help users create graphic stories.

To create your comic, firstly you click on ‘Enter Here’ from the homepage.

This is the main page in which you create your comic.

• Type a title for your comic strip and type your name next to “Author’s Name.”
• Choose whether you want 2, 3 or 4 panels.
• Click on the red dialogue Prompt at the bottom of Panel which is selected by default when you begin.

A text box like this will drop down with directions and information to help you get started and guide you. Very useful tool.

  

• Choose a character by clicking on their face.
• Notice how the character now shows up in the menu window.
• Use the red arrows below your character to choose an emotion such as happy, sad, angry or worried.The picture will change to match the mood

• Once you have chosen the emotion, click on the character.
• It will automatically move your character into the Comic Panel as shown to the left.
• Click on a bubble to select it. It will move it to the menu window. Use the arrows to choose the type and size.
• Now click on the bubble you want and it will place it up in panel.
• Click in the speech bubble to type text.

Using the Tools

• To use the editing tools, first click on a specific tool.
• Notice how the tool turns red (to show it’s selected.)
• Now click on the object in a panel that you want to edit.
• Example: If I click on the first tool which is move, it turns red. Now if I click on a character or speech bubble it will let me move it around.
• The secret is to select the tool first.

• You can also add a Panel prompt. Click on the prompt, and it will add it to the menu window.
• Click on the one you decide to use and it will show up in the selected panel as shown.
• Click on the Print/Email button in the tools menu

• It will take you to this screen.
• Click on the Print button to print.
• Make sure to do this first if you want a hard copy.

• Now click on the Go back and Edit link at the bottom
• It will take you back to the editing window. Click on Print/Email link again.
• To send your comic to someone, fill in the email information.
• Click on the email Comix link

• They give you one last chance to go back and edit.
• You can also take a screen shot of your picture since you can’t save it.

 Educational benefits: 

• Children of all ages can use Makebeliefscomix to improve their literacy skills  in the following ways:
• Reinforce sequencing skills as they “retelling a story” using characters and dialogue.
• Provides application for summarization skills by using only the most important details.
• Understand and apply characters feelings and emotions as an important role in any story.
• Understand and apply how the “mood” sets the background.
• Identify the main idea of the story.
• Provides students with an innovative and creative way to “show” what they know.
• Students can use to create stories they make up on their own.
• Provides an authentic audience and purpose for writing as they share their comic strips with others.
• Offers an avenue for collaboration with teachers and peers as a tool to enhance their writing. They become online authors. They have a real, live purpose for writing.
• Helps ESL students learn English.

These examples can be enhanced as long as you are determined to teach your students English in a way that they will enjoy and learn effectively, benefitting from technology. MakeBeliefsComix will definitely arouse interest among your students with its fun characters,objects and scenes.

Hope that this is useful, thank you :)

ONLINE BUSINESS PRESENTATION SOFTWARE: POWTOON

 
Hello everyone! Today I will introduce you a website that allows you to create animated cartoons: PowToon! In our class, my partner Şule Genç and we made a presentation about this digital tool.

Powtoon is a combination of presentation and animated cartoon.



And what is PowToon? As I said, It is an online tool that allows you to create free, cool, and awesome animated cartoons. It is simple to use and you can create animations which you want, according to your creativity and imagination.

It may be the right tool for you. You can use it for your works, your education or your any personal training.

Now, we are entering powtoon.com. We have created an easy and short text. We will demonstrate it step by step all together.  In home page we see that we can sign in with our google, facebook or linkedin accounts. Or we can join for free. When we join we can achieve all tools that premium members have for 2 days. You can both use readymade temples and your own scratch. Because of our limited time, today, we will start from scratch that we have created for our presentation.

On the right there are library, backgrounds, sounds, images, text etc. that you can add to your animation and can relocate and resize them. We will start with background. There are readymade backgrounds and also you can upload a photo from your library and a webpage. Then we wrote our title. Jenny and her mother. We can arrange our text’s time by clicking here. By clicking edit button next on the text we can add effect. We chose hand effect. And also we can add exit effect, too.  At the same time, you can add and remove seconds to timeline. The limit is 20 seconds. We choose characters from library part.  We can change our character’s poses. Our sentence is ‘Jenny’s mother was working very hard.’ So we chose this one.  We can add effects to transitions, too. There are many different things. We repeat the same steps for each scene. We can add our voice recordings and background music or we can use powtoon’s backgrounds. Also we can audio record our voice on website.
You cannot download it directly to your computer. So you can share it in youtube and then download it from youtube.

We want to show you our own digital story which was our weekly project.We made it with powtoon.

And when it comes to my opinions about that tool, I can say that if you
want to improve student's learning through multimedia in the modern classrooms, Powtoon will be a very effective and easy tool for you and your future students.
Almost all technological tools have
affordances and disadvantages. Besides all affordances that Powtoon has, it has disadvantages, too.



I think, the first one is that you have only 2 days of free version. And to download the animation you make, it forces you to get a premium account. But we gave the solution to you. You can share your animation on youtube and download from there.

And the second disadvantage is that the page sometimes can be very slow. You may have trouble with moving objects.

As powtoon is generally designed for creating stories, you can give tasks your students about digital storytelling, for example. And want them to create their own stories and animate it. It helps your students improve their writing skills, creativity, imagination and technological knowledge. I believe that it will be very fun both for us and our students. That's all, thank you :)