UPDATE: Make Beliefs Comix is now available as an iPad app.
Teachers who like using innovative and free tools to help students with writing should check out this free site: Make Beliefs Comix. Within a few minutes of making a comic strip of my own, I thought of a dozen possibilities for the classroom. My students began by illustrating an important scene from their novels. Once they understood how to apply the features of this online tool, I asked them to create a comic with dialogue that included our four vocabulary words. When they finish a comic, I help them edit and revise the writing, and then they email the final draft to me. When I open these from my inbox, I print them out and give them to the students to save in their writing folders. Even though the size of the comic strip limits the amount of writing, this is a perfect opportunity to help students focus on their mechanical and usage errors. By reading the dialogue in my students' comics, I could immediately see which students did not understand the meaning of our vocabulary words. I also pinpointed many common errors that my students should not be making in eighth and ninth grade: not capitalizing the beginning of sentences or the personal pronoun I and forgetting to end each sentence with punctuation. They have to make all these corrections before they email the final draft. I continue to think of new uses for MakeBeliefComix. The examples below are student work that illustrate a conversation in which one character does not make an important inference.
