Make Beliefs Comix

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.

Two (Free!) Apps ELA Teachers Will Love: Word Mover and Poems by Heart

Word Mover (readwritethink) and Poems by Heart (Penguin Classics) are two exciting apps for writing and fluency. One of my litmus tests for educational software is that it must improve upon its hands-on equivalent. If it functions no better than the literal version, many times the app will not help the students learn more productively. Word Mover's options, including several word banks and the ability to add your own words, inspired my students to construct impressive sentences and even several lines of poetry. A variety of backgrounds, fonts, and text colors are attractive strengths for this app. While testing the app I found myself inspired by the word bank's imagery and abstract words that suggested poetry: gold, gray, silent, sun, snow; love, new, hope, lost, believe, imagine. I was impressed with the positive results I saw when my students used the app. The most resistant writers in my class surprised themselves when they easily pieced together poetic sentences. Several students discovered how to make use of the app on their own, but I instructed most students to start by selecting the most provocative words from multiple word banks until they thought of a uniting theme. Then they placed the words in a logical order and added the articles and verbs that were necessary for complete thoughts. Once they followed this strategy, they were freed from starting their poem with lines like "Roses are red, violets are blue."

Poems by Heart leads students through the process of memorizing poems of increasing difficulty by reading, writing (filling in the blanks), listening, and speaking. In the first stage, students listen to an audio recording of the poem.  As they progress through each stage, students assess their memorization of the lines, and by the last stage, they record their recititation of the entire poem. Teachers need to help their students paraphrase the poems so this does not become an exercise in mindless parroting, and as a follow-up activity students should analyze the poem for deeper meaning.
Both apps are examples of software that enhances learning rather than merely digitizing paper and pencil activities.



Make Your Own Myth

As the end of the year was quickly approaching, I searched far and wide to find resources for a cumulative project that would require students to integrate the application of reading strategies, vocabulary development, and analysis of literary elements that we have been practicing since the beginning of the year. The project also had to fulfill another requirement, since we were entering the last two weeks of school: It had to allow students to be creative.

In my previous post, I described how Toontastic can be used to illustrate a short tale. After completing that project, I found another program that I probably will use in place of Toontastic because of its  infinite array of options.

The Myths and Legends site is one of those resources that I can scarcely believe I didn't know about before. It's so extensive that each time I use the site, I find something new. Teachers will find the site is adaptable for a range of lessons, but it works well for this project.

I began with a mini-lesson on motifs commonly found in fairy tales and medieval literature. Understanding these motifs, students can make predictions and identify themes. I read "The Marriage of Sir Gawain" aloud while students read the text on the iPad. (I posted a list of links for my students on Trackstar4teachers.org)

In assigned groups, students chose another tale from the list and read it aloud together, again using the iPads so they could define unknown words easily. Then they returned to the motifs chart and described the motifs that appeared in their story.

The final step required more re-reading than even I expected, and that's what I believe makes this a worthwhile project. Illustrating a tale using the site appears to be a simple task. Instead, I saw my students referring to the text and asking questions about the characters and events, and this was after they were quite sure they understood the story. This is when it became apparent to me and my students that their comprehension wasn't as lucid as we thought.

As with any new project, I realized I would need to make adjustments for next year but the advantages outweigh the few disadvantages.
Pros:

• Using the iPads was an advantage for building vocabulary. Watching the students look up the words reminded me once again that I can never make assumptions about what words they know--they needed definitions for words that teachers would assume their students acquired in earlier years.
• Students need to practice re-reading text to clarify meaning. This project requires them to return to the text multiple times and ask questions in order to complete the illustration correctly.
• The students' work allows me to instantly check their comprehension: When several students placed a character indoors instead of in the garden, I immediately knew they had misread the description of the setting, and I was able to direct them back to the paragraph where they would find these details.
• Each scene allows students to type a description of the events and add dialogue, and of course this is a perfect learning opportunity for improving style and mechanics.

Cons:

• I need to find better ways to utilize the iPad for vocabulary; we didn't use this feature to its full potential, and this is an area I need to improve for next year.
• If the options in Toontastic can distract students, the Myths and Legends program is absolutely mesmerizing. It's too easy for students to become absorbed with the sheer number of scenes, characters, objects, animations, and sounds that the site allows them to choose. My biggest mistake was not requiring students to have a clear outline of the events and captions before beginning their illustration. Even focused students found it difficult to illustrate the tale from beginning to end because they spent an inordinate amount of time looking through the pictures and improving each scene, and as a result, not everyone was able to present a completed product.

Please leave your comments about similar programs, or if you've used the site, how it has worked in your classroom.