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"Make Beliefs Comix is a free multilingual comic strip creation tool that I've featured many times over the years on Free Technology for Teachers. Recently, Make Beliefs Comix released an updated iPad app for creating comic strips. The best feature of the app is that it supports the creation of comics in seven languages; English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Latin."

""If you imagine less, less will be what you undoubtedly deserve," Debbie Millman counseled in one of the best commencement speeches ever given, urging: "Do what you love, and don't stop until you get what you love. Work as hard as you can, imagine immensities…" Far from Pollyanna platitude, this advice actually reflects what modern psychology knows about how belief systems about our own abilities and potential fuel our behavior and predict our success. Much of that understanding stems from the work of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, synthesized in her remarkably insightful Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (public library) - an inquiry into the power of our beliefs, both conscious and unconscious, and how changing even the simplest of them can have profound impact on nearly every aspect of our lives. One of the most basic beliefs we carry about ourselves, Dweck found in her research, has to do with how we view and inhabit what we consider to be our personality. A "fixed mindset" assumes that our character, intelligence, and creative ability are static givens which we can't change in any meaningful way, and success is the affirmation of that inherent intelligence, an assessment of how those givens measure up against an equally fixed standard; striving for success and avoiding failure at all costs become a way of maintaining the sense of being smart or skilled. A "growth mindset," on the other hand, thrives on challenge and sees failure not as evidence of unintelligence but as a heartening springboard for growth and for stretching our existing abilities. Out of these two mindsets, which we manifest from a very early age, springs a great deal of our behavior, our relationship with success and failure in both professional and personal contexts, and ultimately our capacity for happiness."

In a world where anyone with an internet connection can access, create and share information, opinions and beliefs, it has become increasingly important that students are not only able to assess the credibility of sources but also to look more deeply at the underlying motivations, beliefs and bias of the creator.

"But using technology in the classroom-and using it effectively-might require some slight adjustments on the part of the teacher to sustain the effort, creative problem-solving, and innovation required to actually improve learning through the use of technology. (And great administrators, too.) This occurs at the belief level-what teachers believe about technology, education, and their own abilities to manage technology. Looking at the characteristics of teachers that effectively use technology in the classroom, then, can be useful to create an "edtech" mindset-one that believes in purpose, adaptation, change, and meaningful planning. If you spend your time planning at the upper limits of the SAMR model, this graphic may simply work as a quick reminder of how edtech can work-and work well-at the teacher-human-belief level. For everyone else, it's a a beautiful starting point to frame your thinking about education technology in general."

The educator, as a growth mindset facilitator and coach, has a different, often unique, set of beliefs about students learning and growth. The following infographic shows (1) the common beliefs of an educator who promotes a growth mindset, and (2) some reflection questions about instructional practices that reinforce the growth mindset:

""Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." We should learn from experiences, particularly if those experiences show our previous beliefs to be untrue. So why are people so easy to fool when it comes to beliefs about learning? For years, a stream of articles have tried to dispel pervasive but wrong ideas about how people learn, but those ideas still linger. For example, there is no evidence that matching instructional materials to a student's preferred "learning style" helps learning, nor that there are "right-brain" and "left-brain" learners. The idea that younger people are "digital natives" who use technology more effectively and who can multi-task is also not supported by scientific research."

"Which brings me to news literacy and learners - how to distinguish what is real and what is fake? What is real information and what is misinformation?"

"In Visible Learning John Hattie basically says that almost everything we do in our efforts to help students in schools has a positive effect on students. However, much of what we do actually isn't terribly effective… despite our beliefs in these practices. (For example: Homework)"

"etting enough sleep is an under-valued but crucial part of learning. Contrary to students' belief that staying up all night to cram for an exam will lead to higher scores, truth is, the need for a good night's rest is even more important than finishing homework or studying for a test."

"I recently co-presented a workshop with an educator who is very different from me. She is both experienced and knowledgeable, but our beliefs about teaching and learning don't coincide, so the planning process involved much disagreement and compromise."

"The most powerful thing she said was something that education policy makers will ignore at all costs. That is that Creativity is the next essential literacy. Now keep in mind I am just beginning to try and wrap my mind around what that may look like. My first belief in this discussion is that creativity is something that begins at a young age. I also believe that creativity and imagination go hand and hand. When I teach my courses for the college I refer to imagination as a sense of wonder because often people are distracted by the word imagination. This is because it brings up a short time in their life when they were encouraged to imagine. As an education system we ignore imagination and we have quickly weeded out that perceived "unnecessary" tool over the past 20 years. "

""I recently learned, for the first time, about Aristotle's belief that there were three basic activities of humans: theoria (thinking), poiesis (making), and praxis (doing). Corresponding to these activities were three types of knowledge: theoretical, the end goal being truth; poietical, the end goal being production; and practical, the end goal being action (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxis_(process)).... All of this led me to think about how this would translate into a full spectrum of making in the context of maker educator. Having such a framework would help insure that learning from the making experience is more robust, not left up to chance. I believe a fuller spectrum or framework would including the following elements:"

"Filmmaking is increasingly being used in the classroom by teachers who understand the wants, hopes and aspirations of their pupils. Recent BBC documentary The Rise of the Superstar Vloggers was an extremely interesting insight into what many people wrongly perceive to be a frivolous activity and an easy route to fame and fortune. Contrary to popular belief, becoming a superstar vlogger involves hours and hours of researching and writing content. When we consider how popular video is with children, it becomes clear that filmmaking is the secret weapon for accelerating progress in schools. By using filmmaking as an incentive to write, pupils are working to produce the kind of media that they love, while the teacher is easily able to coerce them to improve their writing and reading using video as a constant hook. One such school who took the plunge into filmmaking is Northway Primary School in Liverpool, nominated for the Educate Awards Innovative & Creative Literacy Award. Over the course of 11 weeks, the pupils planned, drafted, edited, performed and filmed their very own adventure film based on El Dorado, the search for the lost city of gold in Colombia made famous by Christopher Columbus himself."

"A growth mindset, as described by Carol Dweck, is a belief that while individuals are different in many ways in terms of their initial performance, interests, talents, and skills, everyone can improve, change, and grow through application and experience. We believe that one of the greatest school-based factors for improving education today is empowering educators with opportunities to develop a growth mindset by working together to build skills and strategies to increase the impact of their instruction in the classroom."

"While project-based learning has existed for decades, design thinking has recently entered the education lexicon, even though its history can be traced back to Herbert A. Simon's 1969 book The Sciences of the Artificial. So why the resurgence of these ideas? Lately, I have heard teachers and school leaders express a common frustration: "We are _______ years into a _______ initiative, and nothing seems to have changed." Despite redesigning learning spaces, adding technology, or even flipping instruction, they still struggle to innovate or positively change the classroom experience. Imagine innovation as a three-legged stool. Many schools have changed the environment leg, but not the other two legs: the behaviors and beliefs of the teachers, administrators, and students. Consider this conundrum: much of what we know about teaching comes from 16+ years of observation as students. In no other profession do you spend that much time watching the previous generation before being told to change everything once you take control. Without the framework or scaffolding for that change, it's truly unreasonable to tell educators, "OK, start innovating.""

"Don't get me wrong - given my Twitter ID it's a given that I believe very strongly in using technology to support and enhance learning. The OED states that an evangelist is "a person who seeks to convert others to the Christian faith, especially by public preaching", so ok… I might not be doing the Christian faith bit, but as an 'ICT Evangelist' I do believe that technology has the power to change our world and certainly the learning that takes place in our classrooms and beyond. There's a problem though. There is a dichotomy of experiences, skills, beliefs and abilities when it comes to using technology in our classrooms. It's written in to the United States Declaration of Independence that, "all men are born equal", but it's certainly not true when it comes to the experiences that our students receive in their lessons at the hands of some of our teachers and that's before you even think about entering technology into the equation."

"As we head towards a world where coding is considered a necessary skill, teaching pupils the basics of programming has never been more crucial. Unlike the common belief that coding is a specialised skill only applicable to selected areas, programming is actually used in almost all industries. Coding is not for young adults and 'geeks' anymore; even elementary students can easily dive into this complex world with the use of modern day technology. The qualm that people have against teaching coding so early usually involves lack of space in the current curriculum and the lack of confidence (in the child or teacher's) ability to code themselves. Thanks to the rise in popularity of mobile technology and apps, even the most inexperienced user can easily learn the core concepts of coding. Below are great apps which you can utilise to learn and teach basic programming."

"Whether we're talking about preschool, elementary through secondary school, college, or even adult learners, I have serious objections to the idea that learning supposedly only comes via the eyes, the ears, and the seat of the pants. Schools -- and policymakers -- have for too long accepted the belief that learning best occurs while students are seated (and quiet, of course). The theory may have been understandable back when they didn't have the research to prove otherwise. But today we do."

"I was asked recently why I have a strong interest and innate understanding of the growth mindset. I believe it comes from a background of being an adventure educator, and even though it was not labeled as such, the adventure educator embraces a growth mindset when working with participants. The underlying tenet of adventure education is "You are capable of so much more than you can even imagine. I believe in you and your capabilities; and I will set up the conditions for you to develop and amplify that same belief in yourself.""