This is the 12th post in the “30 days to using the best of the web’s free tools for educators” series. Be sure to subscribe to the Teacher Challenge blog by RSS, like us on facebook, and follow us on twitter to keep up with future challenge posts as they are published.

This guest post is written by the groovy librarian – Glenda Morris.

Objectives

In this teacher challenge activity you will:

1. Be introduced to Animoto For Education.
2. Create your own digital story on a topic of your own choice by inserting either your own images or Creative Commons licenced images (or a combination of both).
3. Find Creative Commons licenced images if you don’t know how to locate them already.
4. Write a blog post that includes the digital story you created and share it with the rest of the participants in this Challenge by embedding it to your blog.
5. Make comment on the digital stories created by others in this challenge.
6. Visit the discussion question for this activity and share your ideas.

Overview of Animoto For Education

Animoto For Education is a Web 2.0 tool that allows teachers and students to create impressive and unique digital stories and presentations (incorporating images, video clips, music and text) quickly and easily. Animoto is a wonderful tool for students because it allows them to focus on content creation rather than trying to learn an editing or manipulation tool. In the school context, Animoto For Education is ideal tool for students to create their own booktrailers, digital stories or music videos.

To use Animoto For Education students or teachers simply upload images, video or music to Animoto (preferably students’ own or Creative Commons Licensed material) or use the tool’s bank of media resources. Animoto then mixes the images, video and music together to the beat to create a professional-looking video in minutes. If students don’t like the video they’ve created they can remix their video using the same images and audio until they’re satisfied. These digital videos can be uploaded to YouTube, SchoolTube or TeacherTube and shared, therefore students have a real audience for their work.

Teachers can apply for a free, unlimited teacher account with an all-access pass for their students, Animoto For Educators account that offers more benefits than the standard Animoto account. Animoto For Education provides: full-length videos with music, rather than being limited to 30-second free videos unlimited videos for teachers and their students the creation of group accounts where teachers can monitor students’ progress videos created can only be seen by the users of the account, UNLESS the teacher decides to embed or link the video to another site.

Here is a one-minute Animoto digital story titled Being A Teacher Librarian that I recently created.

Challenge Task

Step 1. Register with Animoto or sign in (if you already have an account). If registering, make sure you then sign up to the FREE Animoto Educator’s Plus account and complete your details.

NB: It may take up to 3 days or so for your Educator’s account to be verified. However, you can still continue with this Challenge.

Step 2 &3. On a topic of your own choice create your first Animoto digital story. For example, digital story ideas could include what you enjoy about teaching, your pet, your family, a recent holiday.

• Upload, retrieve or select your images or video
• Select some music from the library or upload your own music
• Finalise/customise your video – image pacing, video length, video style (theme), add a title, a description and your name.

If you are not sure about where to locate Creative Commons Licenced Material for your digital story, make sure you check out Step 2: Using Creative Commons Images In Posts from the Kick Start Your Blogging Teacher Challenge Activity 5.

Step 4. Write a blog post that includes the digital story you have just created and share it with the rest of the participants in this Challenge by embedding it into your blog.
Add relevant tags to your blog entry #ebshare

Step 5. Comment on the blog posts containing the digital stories of other participants in this Animoto Challenge.

Step 6. Discussion Question
Leave a comment on this post answering the following:

In what ways could you, or teachers in your school, use Animoto in the classroom? Ideas could be specific tasks, subjects and/or year levels.

You might also include this in a blog post of your own for this task.

Further Advice

For a detailed tutorial on creating videos using Animoto For Education check out this TeacherTubetutorial

For information on creating your first video with Animoto check out Creating Free Online Slideshows with Animoto in the Classroom.

About Me

I am Glenda Morris, a Teacher Librarian at OLMC, an all-girls secondary school, in Melbourne, Australia. My Groovy Librarian blog is a space where I reflect on my experiments with a range of Web 2.0 technologies and write about my continuing life-long learning journey as a Teacher Librarian. I love exploring the potential use of technology integration in classrooms to enhance student learning and to help teachers facilitate their teaching programs.

You can check out my wiki Web2foryou which is a collection of Web 2.0 tools that I originally created for INF506 Social Networking for Information Professionals subject for my Masters of Education (Teacher Librarianship). This wiki will continually be updated with new tools (when time permits).

Prior to completing my Masters of Education (Teacher Librarianship) from Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, Australia, I was a Media Studies and English teacher at an all-boys school.

I am fortunate to be selected to attend the Google Teachers Academy in Sydney on April 20, 2011.

This is the 11th post in the “30 days to using the best of the web’s free tools for educators” series. Be sure to subscribe to the Teacher Challenge blog by RSS, like us on facebook, and follow us on twitter to keep up with future challenge posts as they are published.

This challenge post is a bit different than all of the rest and we hope that is ok!

Sue Waters published a lengthy and informative post about setting up and using Skype in the classroom today.

Free voice and video calls using Skype is great for talking with authors, experts, peer classrooms, language classes, and more – all with a pretty simple and cost effective set-up.

Rather than summarizing and re-hashing it all here, head on over to The Complete Educator’s Guide to Using Skype effectively in the classroom to get a complete step-by-step overview.

Challenge

1. Read the post to learn all about Skyping in education
2. Visit TheEdublogger.com’s Skype List and consider adding your class to the list
3. Schedule a time to try Skype with your students in the next month or two
4. Leave a comment on this post telling us about your experience!

Additional Resources

You might find some of the following resources helpful as well:

1. The official Skype in Education website
2. The Technology 4 Kids Skype Wiki – lots of resources!
3. YouTube Video – Using Skype to talk to authors

This is the 10th post in the “30 days to using the best of the web’s free tools for educators” series. Be sure to subscribe to the Teacher Challenge blog by RSS, like us on facebook, and follow us on twitter to keep up with future challenge posts as they are published.

This guest post is written by Marsha Ratzel.

Most people that write for the web tell us that a picture helps to draw reader interest to the post. What if the picture is composed from words? Does it have the same impact?

Wordle, or a word cloud, helps to interpret the meaning of the words by assigning font size according to how frequently the word appears in the targeted text. This is one of the most popular online tool with almost 14,000 visitors each day stopping by to do anything from fans typing in their favorite music videos, teachers analyzing literary texts, kids making signs, spouses writing love letter and journalists wordling political speeches.

Wordles have been used in a multitude of ways from PowerPoint slides, to pictures for T-shirts, magazine covers, scrapbooking layouts, birthday cards, Valentine’s wishes, Back to School night posters, Get to Know You activities on the first day of school to YouTube videos.

You name it, it’s probably been done in some form.

Overview

Simple to do…. browse onto the Wordle page, paste in the text that you want to use for the word cloud and submit for processing. Within a few seconds, you’ll be gifted with a cloud from a randomly chosen style, color scheme and layout.

Then just keep experimenting with different settings until you’re please with how the image looks…customizing it to meet your needs perfectly. It’s truly one of the easiest to use online tools.

Examples

To get you in the brainstorming mode, let’s look at ideas where other teachers have found used Wordle to be a useful instructional tool. Here are a number of examples that may be helpful to get you thinking about how you could use this tool.

• Spelling and learning new vocabulary words
• Print a Wordles as bookmarks or librarians used Wordles to create descriptions of Dewey Decimal sections
• Use Wordle as another way to graph
• Wordles point out most often used words in curriculum standards and can help analyze what skills or concepts are emphasized
• Students can analyze their own writing by pasting in their drafts to see if they’ve used certain words or phrases too often…it can help spot cliches
• Can help summarize big ideas of a chapter or passage of text. Can allow you to examine the bookmarks you’ve saved on a particular topic to see if there are themes or trends in the saved files.
• Anything where time is of the essence and a picture can communicate the ideas more quickly than reading a large bit of text.
• Analyze what you’ve written about the most in your writing portfolio or in your blog Have each student create their version of classroom rules, paste them all into Wordle and find the most common ideas that students agreed upon.
• Create classroom polls where each child gets to enter one word on “what’s your favorite color?”
• A high school chemistry teacher encourages students to see what the most important vocabulary words are in sections of each chapter.
• A journalism teacher compares political speeches of the Queen from one year to another or the President’s State of the Union message.

Help & Tips on using Wordle

Easy to watch tutorial videos can be found on YouTube in several places. This one is only three minutes long and easy to watch.

In addition to how the video shows to get the Wordle into your blog or document, you can also take a screenshot of the final version.

In the PC world, you’ll have to paste that into a PowerPoint and save it as a .jpg in order to import it elsewhere. In the Mac world, the screenshots are saved as .png files which import as is into most blogs and documents…. or you can open it in Preview and save it under a new name as a .jpg file type.

Challenge Task

Think about how you might use a Wordle to

1. use with your students as a way to communicate an idea to them;
2. have your students try out in a classroom activity; or
3. analyze the last three month’s of blog posts to see what topics appear the most and what are the most frequently used words

Be sure to add a comment to share your ideas and to link us back to where you’ve posted your work.

Want to extend this kind of instructional tool a bit???

Additional resources to check out….

Go read Larry Ferlazzo’s post, The Best Resources for Learning about “Word Clouds” and look at one of the two tools he mentions that extends the ideas of Wordle—Tagxedo and Answer Garden. See if either of these makes sense for your classroom application. If you have time, try it out or imagine what you’d do with the tool and then write a post explaining your plan.

About the Author

My name is Marsha Ratzel and I teach middle school in Overland Park, Kansas. As a science teacher, I’m always looking for ways to communicate ideas in different ways and from a visual learner perspective, which is what drew me to something like Wordle.

It’s a time efficient, student/teacher friendly tool to get people talking about the ideas not so much about the technology. I’ve been writing a professional reflection blog since 2003 and have just gotten started in the classroom blogging world during the 2010-2011 school year.

This is the 8th post in the “30 days to using the best of the web’s free tools for educators” series. Be sure to subscribe to the Teacher Challenge blog by RSS, like us on facebook, and follow us on twitter to keep up with future challenge posts as they are published.

This guest post is written by the groovy librarian – Glenda Morris.

In today’s education climate it is essential that students acquire the skills to be creators, collaborators, critical thinkers and communicators in the 21st Century. One way to help students achieve those skills is for teachers to offer students a range of digital tools in which to present and share their work. One such tool I have found extremely useful in encouraging students to extend their thinking and be engaged in their learning is through GlogsterEDU.

This post will help you gain the knowledge and skills to use the FREE GlogsterEDU (BASIC) version with students in your classroom or to use the tool to yourself to share information with your students.

Objectives

In this teacher challenge activity you will:

• Be introduced to GlogsterEDU and what a ‘glog’ is.
• Create your own digital poster, or ‘glog’ on a topic of your own choice by inserting a range of multimedia.
• Find Creative Commons licenced images or videos, or use your own images or videos, for embedding into your glog.
• Write a blog post that includes the digital poster, or ‘glog’ you created and share it with the rest of the participants in this Challenge.
• Learn how to embed your glog into your blog.
• Make comment on glogs created by others in this challenge.
• Visit the discussion question for this activity and share your ideas.

Overview of Glogster

GlogsterEDU (the Basic, Free version) is a Web 2.0 tool that allows students, or yourself, to create an online interactive poster/presentation/research on any topic that combines graphics, backgrounds, videos, images, sound, text and hyperlinks. (Please note: adding data (for example, Powerpoint, Word, PDF) to glogs is only available on the Premium, paid version of GlogsterEDU). Importantly the tool encourages students to gather their information, synthesise it, remix it and then create their original presentation. It is an excellent alternative to the traditional classroom poster project by giving it a 21st Century twist (and it’s not messy or bulky). Glogs look absolutely fabulous when students present their work to their peers via the interactive whiteboard. GlogsterEDU is easy to use even for the most novice computer users and, importantly, students love using this program.

GlogsterEDU provides teachers with a safe virtual space where they can manage up to 50 student accounts. Randomly generated usernames and passwords (containing numbers and/or letters) become the students’ logins. However you can, under the manage student accounts tab, edit the nicknames (I suggest first name and maybe initial) and change the passwords. These can then be distributed to students. You can then monitor your students’ progress from your ‘teacher screen’. Students and teacher can share and comment on each other’s creations.

When I introduce this tool (or any other presentation tool) to students I stress the importance of considering carefully all aspects of their multimedia inclusions (backgrounds, video, text, images ect.) on their glog. For example, I ask students how are the background, graphics, text boxes appropriate to the glog’s topic.

Check out this simple, yet comphrenesive GlogsterEDU step-by-step tutorial by Traci Blazosky for setting up your own class glogs.

Alternatively, you can check out Blazoky’s video tutorial here (which is hosted by Glogster). (Please note: the number of student accounts with each teacher account is 50).

Challenge Task

Step 1. Register with GlogsterEDU or sign in (if you already have an account). If registering, make sure you sign up to the FREE Basic Teacher account and complete your details.

Step 2. Go to your Dashboard at the top of the page and start creating your own interactive glog on a topic of your own choice. Use the black tool box to start building you glog and try to incorporate a variety of media, including text, links, images, graphics, audio and video. I suggest starting your glog with choosing a wall (or theme, background) which can always be changed later. Then continue to build your glog and experiment with the variety of tools, layouts, media and fonts.
Save, name and categorise/tag your glog.

IMPORTANT: Save frequently. GlogsterEDU currently has NO autosave like some other Web 2.0 tools. If you want to navigate away from GlogsterEDU, you MUST save BEFORE moving away from the site, otherwise you will LOSE what was not previously saved.

To add a link simply copy and paste the URL into the box.

Step 3. You can upload your own videos, audio or images or use Creative Commons Licensed material.
For detailed information on Creative Commons, check out Step 2: Using Creative Commons Images In Posts from the Kick Start Your Blogging Teacher Challenge Activity 5.

Steps 4 & 5. Write a blog post that includes the digital poster, or ‘glog’ you have just created and share it with the rest of the participants in this Challenge. You will need to embed your glog into your blog and adjust the embed size. See Step 2: Embedding Media Into Blog Posts from the Kick Start Your Blogging Teacher Challenge Activity 6.

Add relevant tags to your blog entry #ebshare

Here is a glog I created on the topic of Creative Commons that I completed just before this challenge began.

Step 6. Comment on the blog posts containing the glogs of 4 other participants in this GlogsterEDU Challenge.

Step 7. Discussion Question
In what ways could you, or teachers in your school, use GlogsterEDU in the classroom? Ideas could be specific tasks, subjects and/or year levels.
You might include this as your blog post for this task.

Further Advice

Above: This How To: Glogster poster was created by Tiffany Whitehead from her Librariantiff’s Flickr Photostream.

Glogster In 90 Seconds – A good introduction in 90 seconds to using Glogster.

For more detailed set of instructions for using Glogster check out Kathe Santillo’s Scribd document.

About the Author

I am Glenda Morris, a Teacher Librarian at OLMC, an all-girls secondary school, in Melbourne, Australia. My Groovy Librarian blog is a space where I reflect on my experiments with a range of Web 2.0 technologies and write about my continuing life-long learning journey as a Teacher Librarian. I love exploring the potential use of technology integration in classrooms to enhance student learning and to help teachers facilitate their teaching programs. I am committed to imparting my ICT knowledge and expertise to assist students to acquire the skills to be 21st Century learners. I also love reading (as any good Teacher Librarian would) particularly Supernatural stories.

You can check out my wiki Web2foryou which is a collection of Web 2.0 tools that I originally created for INF506 Social Networking for Information Professionals subject for my Masters of Education (Teacher Librarianship). This wiki will continually be updated with new tools (when time permits).

Prior to completing my Masters of Education (Teacher Librarianship) from Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, Australia, I was a Media Studies and English teacher at an all-boys school.

I am fortunate to be selected to attend the Google Teachers Academy in Sydney on April 20, 2011.

This is the 6th post in the “30 days to using the best of the web’s free tools for educators” series. Be sure to subscribe to the Teacher Challenge blog by RSS, like us on facebook, and follow us on twitter to keep up with future challenge posts as they are published.

Objectives:

In this activity you will:

1. Learn about DoInk.
2. Learn how to use DoInk.
3. Learn about uses of DoInk in the classroom.
4. Create a DoInk animation or image of your own.

Overview:

So what is DoInk? First of all, it is pronounced Do Ink, not doink. Don’t worry; I made that mistake myself at first! According to the DoInk site, it is a “simple & friendly vector editor; (you) can create flash-style animations; use community art & your own; post to YouTube & Facebook; download your art.” But perhaps more than just an explanation of what DoInk is, you’d like to see an example.

Tectonic Plate Boundries by LoganAnimations, made at DoInk.com

This amazing animation was created by one of my students as part of a performance assessment on our plate tectonics unit.

Challenge Task:

1.   Visit the DoInk site. At the search box in the top right corner, you can search for material related to the content that you teach and see if there is anything already created that you can use in your classroom.

2.   Create a DoInk account. First, click on the sign up button in the header region.

That will bring you to the registration page. Create a username and password, add your email address, put in your year of birth, agree to the terms of service, and then hit “register now”.

Please note that DoInk is only for students 13 or older. However, that shouldn’t stop you from creating your own pictures and animations to embed on class sites and to share in class to help explain concepts!

3.  Write a post about what you find on DoInk. Reflect on ways you could use DoInk in your classroom. When you are done, be sure to comment on this post with a link to your post.

Help and Tips:

As you look around at DoInk, be sure to have fun and play around. If you try to create your own images and animations, I suggest sticking with static images first, and then working your way up to animations. You can also create separate static images that you can incorporate into your animations. Also, there is a community on DoInk that provides background images, and foreground elements that you can incorporate into the animations that you create. When I worked on DoInk with my students, they were able to do so much more than I ever imagined or tried to do myself, so also know that our students are going to be better experts at this than most of us are.

DoInk is flash based, so you will need to use a computer equipped with flash in order to play and create drawings and animations. However, there is a DoInk iPad app. However, the iPad app does cost $4.99 (US).

Finally, there are a couple of people you can follow on Twitter to find out more regarding DoInk. Karen Miller is one of the founders of DoInk, and DoInk Tweets is the official account. Karen Miller is especially supportive of DoInk’s use in education.

Extend and Discuss:

For the extension activity, create a DoInk animation or image. Create a post about your creation, and share it on your blog. Then, post a link to it in the comment section.

What ways can you think of to use DoInk in education? Do you have any ideas that jump out at you right away? Is there something I am missing? Please feel free to share your comments below or to create a blog post about them and link to it here.

About the Author:

Janelle Wilson is a sixth grade Earth science teacher at Lanier Middle School in Buford, GA, USA. She is a total science nerd and an incredible space geek. She loves sharing with her students the possibilities that science can help us create in the future. She had the privilege to attend the launch of Atlantis STS-132 in May of last year at the press site and is looking forward to attending Honeywell’s Educators @ Space Academy program this summer. You can find her on Twitter: @janellewilson, her professional blog: Stretching Forward, and her class blog: Mrs. Wilson Science.

This is the 5th post in the “30 days to using the best of the web’s free tools for educators” series. Be sure to subscribe to the Teacher Challenge blog by RSS, like us on facebook, and follow us on twitter to keep up with future challenge posts as they are published.

In this activity you will learn:

• more about what Edmodo is
• how to create your free account
• how to create a group for students

Overview

Edmodo is a Web 2.0 tool that allows teachers to safely share ideas, files, assignments, videos, projects, etc.with students and with other teachers in real time. It is a safe and secure social learning site for classrooms. Edmodo does not require student email addresses and only the people who have the group code can see the students.

The teacher must first register (for free). Then they can create a group or groups for their class. Students will then register and use the teacher’s code to join that class. On the front page of Edmodo, there is a video: What is Edmodo? Spend a few minutes reviewing this video before signing up.

Or, watch an Edmodo overview video from YouTube here:

Below are some samples of ways to use Edmodo in the classroom.

• Pen Pals (go to the Community site to connect with other teachers)
• Make up work for when students are absent
• Video commentary – can post a video on line and have students write comments about the video
• Peer editing
• Book clubs
• Daily feedback
• Students can turn in assignments via Edmodo (documents, glogs, etc.)
• Enter comments on assignments, give positive feedback to students, give grades to students
• Writing vocabulary sentences and having conversations about them

Challenge and Task

To see an example of  Edmodo, register for a free teacher account. Once you are in Edmodo, on the left hand side are the words “Groups Join or Create”. Click on Join and use the following code: zzywbh. This will allow you to join the NCTies EDU Glogster group. You can then view the different URLs that are posted of sample Glogs. The latest posts will be at the top of the page.

Now that you know a little more about Edmodo, how can you use it in your classroom? What do you think your students will say when you tell them you are going to do social networking in your classroom? Please share your comments and post any links (group codes) that you would like other people to look at.

Tips and Resources

The Edmodo blog posts up-to-date information. The blog includes quick tips, managing your account, how to embed glogs, videos, etc.  They also have different webinars every month. If you run into problems, check out the Edmodo Help Center. The support you receive from Edmodo is simply amazing! Edmodo Communities allows teachers to connect with other teachers and see how they are using Edmodo in the classroom.

About

My name is Dorene Bates and I am a District Instructional Technologist with the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. My personal blog is Learning Technology 2.0 and my wiki is Learning Tech 2.0 (from pbworks).

This is the 4th post in the “30 days to using the best of the web’s free tools for educators” series. Be sure to subscribe to the Teacher Challenge blog by RSS, like us on facebook, and follow us on twitter to keep up with future challenge posts as they are published.

This guest post is written by teacher Zoe French.

In this activity you will:

• Learn about Classtools.net
• Choose a resource to use with your students
• Discuss with the community about how these could be used

Overview

Classtools.net is a free flash tool website that allows you to create quizzes, diagrams, and educational games. You can then host them on your own site free of charge.

You can sign up for the premium version of the website if you want access to more tools or ad-free templates.

Here’s a quick video overview from youtube:

Even if you don’t have the time to create something, Classtools.net also has a variety of templates you can use on the go.

I have listed my favourite tools below:

• Venn Diagrams- Instant interactive Venn diagrams for your smart board.
• Post It – Upload an image or piece of text and add notes.
• Random Name/Word Picker- Do you find yourself picking the same students to answer questions? Simply input a class in order to randomly select people to answer questions or input a list of keywords and get students to quiz each other!
• Countdown timer – This is a great behaviour management tool. Use the timer to add pace and structure to your activities or lessons. You can even upload songs for the timer to countdown to, or choose a song from the list.
• Arcade Game Generator – Create your own flash games/quizzes!

Challenge Task

Beginner: Head over to Classtools.net and explore the site. Then pick your favourite template and blog about it. In your blog you should:

• Provide an overview of the site
• Describe your favourite template and provide links, you should also include illustrations.
• Discuss applications to teaching
• If you are feeling adventurous why not try and create your own flash game or diagram?

Advanced: Go to Classtools.net and pick a template and create something. You should then embed your tool on either your website or blog. (Here’s Teacher Challenge tips on embedding.)

Follow the step by step process below to create your own tool. Helps and tips below!

Step 1: In the top right hand corner there is a sample box. Select your subject area. Browse through the examples and see what other people have done.

Step 2: Choose a template for the list in column on the right hand side of the page. If you are still not sure where to start I would suggest you pick the Arcade Game Generator and create a quiz for one of your classes.

Step 3: Once you have finished creating your tool create a link to it or embed it in your blog. See hints and tips below if you are not sure how to do this.

*Note – the option to embed is in the bottom right hand corner of the frame

Help & Tips

Not sure what to do? Make sure you watch the video tutorials on the homepage at the bottom. I have also provided some tips below:

Tips

Don’t know where to start? Check out the sample files in the top right hand corner. Simply click on your subject area to see samples of activities created for your subject using Classtools.net

How to save your tool.
There are few ways you can save your web tool.

Click on the floppy disk image to save as a webpage. You can then save it on your USB or folder and click to open.

Click on the cog/gear image if you want to embed your tool on a webpage. A yellow box will then appear and you can either copy the url or the embed code. From there you either create a link on your site or embed your tool. If you don’t know how to embed a tool I have found this website to be helpful.

*Note – not all tools will let you embed as they are designed to run in the browser:

Discussion Questions

Leave a comment on this post and discuss:

Question 1: Classtools.net is all about providing tools to help enhance your teaching. What makes this site great is that it is not focused towards specific subject areas but instead is useful for all teachers. Do you know of any similar sites? Do you have a favourite tool that you like to use in the classroom? Why don’t you share below!?

Question 2: If you have created something using Classtools.net why don’t you share it below?

About the Author

I have been teaching for four years and I have recently moved from Australia to America. If you are interested in discovering other free web based tools please visit my website: www.digitalenglishteachers.com

I also have a blog: http://digitaleducationforenglishteachers.blogspot.com/.

This is the 3rd post in the “30 days to using the best of the web’s free tools for educators” series. Be sure to subscribe to the Teacher Challenge blog by RSS, like us on facebook, and follow us on twitter to keep up with future challenge posts as they are published.

In this activity you will:

use the comic-making website Bitstrips for Schools to assign your students a comic-based activity.

The goal is for them to create a comic that demonstrates their understanding of a topic or concept that you’ve taught in class.

Overview:

In my day, reading comics in school was in the same category of forbidden activities as chewing gum and making paper planes. Confiscation was guaranteed. Luckily for kids today, perspectives have shifted, with more and more teachers starting to embrace comics as a tool to engage students and stimulate their interest in reading.

An idea that’s getting less attention so far is the potential comics have to improve students’ writing. This isn’t too surprising, since relatively few kids have the combination of patience and artistic skill needed to hand-draw comic strips. That’s where Bitstrips for Schools comes in. It’s a web-based resource that enables any student to write their own great-looking, original comic strips without having to draw. Over 5,000 schools are using Bitstrips for Schools so far, making over 20,000 new comics every day!

The site makes the process of writing visual, personal and fun. It features an avatar maker that lets students design unique, fully poseable cartoon avatars, and a comic builder that lets them create and star in their own curriculum-connected comics. There are hundreds of backgrounds, props and effects to work with, and an image-uploading tool for incorporating photos. By removing drawing from the equation, students have time to focus their attention on composition, sequencing, and most importantly, writing.

Task:

The first step in this challenge is to create your Bitstrips for Schools teacher account at www.bitstripsforschools.com. Just click the Sign Up Today link on the homepage and fill in the fields. You’ll notice that it’s a 30-day trial, but that’s plenty of time to complete this challenge.

Next, you’ll create your virtual classroom and add student names to your class – again, just fill in the fields as you’re prompted. This step will take 3-4 minutes, depending on how many students you have to enter (you can enter up to 40 in one classroom).

Once you’re done, you can design your avatar, which will greet your students when they log in for the first time.

Challenge:

Now for your challenge! Find an activity in the Bitstrips for Schools library that gives your students an opportunity to demonstrate their understanding of a concept or topic that you’ve taught them. You could have them write a book report about a novel they’ve read, or make a comic about energy conservation, preventing bullying or practicing science lab safety. For inspiration, check out these examples of student work.

You can search for activities in the Activities tab in your new account – sort them by grade and subject using the drop-down menus on the left. If you don’t find something that fits, try making your own activity by clicking the New Activity button. Here you’ll be able to write student instructions for your own activity. If you’re feeling adventurous, you can even create a template comic for your activity using the comic builder, which students can use as the starting point for their comic.

Once you’ve picked an activity, make sure you hit the Assign Activity button to assign the activity to your class. Then it’s time to invite your students to log in! Tell them to go to www.bitstripsforschools.com, click the Log In button on the top right of the homepage, and then enter the unique class code you created when you set up your classroom. Your students will then be able to find their names under the dropdown menu, create their passwords and log in.

Now they can create their avatars and start the activity you’ve assigned them. If they run out of time during class, they can log in from home and continue their activity there. Finally, when they’re finished their comic, they can submit it to you to review and provide feedback. They can also share their comics with the class and blog them, with your permission.

And that’s it! I hope you and your students have a lot of fun with this challenge. Let me know if you need help or have any questions in the Comments, and be sure to post your best student comics there as well!

Help & Support:

Start here at Bitstrips for Schools Support with any questions you may have.

And check out this video to get an idea of what teachers and students have to say.

- Shahan Panth, Bitstrips for Schools