We’re proud to announce that the Digi Awards (formerly known as the Canada New Media Awards) has named Bitstrips for Schools Best in E-Learning!

We’re excited and honoured to have received this prestigious award, and want to thank all the teachers and students out there for helping to make the site what it is!

You can find the new dresses under the Outfits tab in the Art Library (where you’ll also find lots of other ready-to-wear ensembles), and can put them on just by dragging them onto your characters. If you want to customize the colors or other parts of your outfit, just click on the outfit icon under My Outfits, where you’ll be able to save custom outfits for all of your characters -

You’ll notice that we’ve also made a change to the appearance of characters – their outlines are now a little bit thinner.  We made the change just because we think it looks much better, and hope you’ll agree!

The old look

The new look!

And now we’ve added a whole range of new household scenes, including bedrooms, backyard (with a chlorinated swimming pool and hot tub!), front yard, kitchen, bathroom, computer room and even a laundry room – 17 new scenes in all.

When you’re playing with the new props, try double-clicking on them to see all their different positions. Most can appear multiple ways – for example, the dishwasher can be open or closed, full or empty!

We’ve also made a subtle but amazing change to how many of the props work. Some of them now have multiple layers, which means that objects can now appear within other objects, instead of simply on top of or behind them. Use the Layering buttons at the bottom of the Comic Builder to try it our for yourself.

Enjoy the new stuff, and look forward to even more coming soon!

One of our most popular requests is to add a wheelchair to the art library. And today the wait is over! If you’d like to put yourself or one of your characters into a wheelchair, just do a search for it in the Art Library search box. Then drag it into your panel like any other prop and take a seat! The wheelchair has 4 separate colorable sections, so it’s easy to make yours look unique. To learn more about finding and using wheelchairs, check out our help page.

Search

Finding an activity is now as simple as typing a topic into the new Search bar. Suggestions appear automatically while you’re typing, and the results show everything at a glance so you can quickly find the right activity and assign it to your class.

Simpler browsing

If you’re not quite sure what you’re looking for, just click on a subject to browse a list of relevant activities. There’s also a new Featured section that shows you activities that are new, popular or timely.

Every activity now has a section showing you what topics it covers  – click on any of them to see every activity in the library that deals with that topic!

Tons more activities

Best of all, there are hundreds of fantastic new activities in the library, created by curriculum specialists and teachers like you. The new Activity Library is a must-see. Whatever you’re teaching, we just might have the activity you’ve been looking for! Check it out here.

Activity progress dashboard

All of the activities you’ve assigned to your class appear on the My Activities homepage. Each activity has a new dashboard that shows student progress categorized into 5 very useful sections -

Submitted for review – these students have sent you comics and are waiting for you to approve them or provide feedback.
Unstarted – these students have yet to start their comic.
In progress – these students have saved a draft but not submitted it to you yet.
In revision – these students have received your feedback but have not yet re-submitted their comic to you.
Approved – these students have successfully completed the activity.

Clicking on any of these categories takes you to the relevant list of students. Generally, the one you’ll be most interested in is Submitted for review, since it’s the list of students who require your feedback.

Review comics faster

And giving feedback is easier than ever. Just hit the ‘Return comic for revision’ button above the comic you’re reviewing and add any comments you have. You’ll then automatically move to the next comic in the review queue! That means no extra clicking or guessing which comic to review next.

On the left of any comic you’re reviewing, you’ll see a list showing each student’s progress, and can easily navigate to any of them to see their work so far. Again, this means less clicking and an easier way to get a snapshot of your class’s progress.

We think you’ll find our new system for managing your activities intuitive and easy to use. Now all you need to do is assign an activity!

You can find it in the Class Permissions box on your Settings page. By default, you’ll see that student access is set to Enabled. To change it, just hit the Change button and choose one of the other options – you can disable access completely or just limit access to school hours. Whichever option you choose, you can always log in any time and change it back. To check it out, just click on the Settings tab in your account.

Now, whenever you drag anything into a panel, you’ll notice a blue box appear around it. This blue box is all you need to move something around, make it bigger or smaller, or rotate it. Here’s how it works:

Moving things around

To move any object inside a panel – including characters, props or even text bubbles – just click on it and start moving it around with your mouse. Okay, so far that’s not really new. But…

Scaling things bigger and smaller

When you hover your mouse over any one of the small squares on the edge of the blue box, you’ll see your cursor switch to the ‘zoom’ icon. When this happens, click the mouse button and move the cursor up and down or side to side – your object will start scaling in the same direction! Next, let go of the button and move your mouse back onto the object. The cursor will switch back to the move icon. This means that you no longer need to use the buttons at the bottom of the Comic Builder every time you want to switch between moving and scaling, so it’s much simpler and faster to position things just the way you want them.

Rotating things

Wait, there’s more! Move your cursor outside any one of the corners of the blue box and it’ll switch to a ‘rotate’ icon, letting you easily spin objects around in either direction.

So now alternating between move, zoom and rotate is just a matter of moving your mouse into different areas of the blue box!

What about the old buttons?

One last thing – the familiar Move, Zoom and Rotate buttons still appear at the bottom of the Comic Builder. These are now only used for working with the background of a comic – for example, zooming in on a whole panel at once, or rotating the entire scene. But to work with individual objects, the new blue box is all you need. Enjoy!

Archive your old classrooms
Keep your homepage uncluttered by filing away your old classrooms. Just log in and go to your Settings tab, and then click the Archive Classroom button under each of the classes you’re not teaching anymore. Archiving is useful since it lets you continue to access previous years’ classwork, plus it gives your old students a way to import their avatars for use in their new class. Learn more about Archiving.

Set up your new class and import your class list
After you create your new classroom, you’ll notice a new option to add all of your student names in one step. So if you have your class list on a spreadsheet or a Word file, you can now just copy and paste all the student names at once! If you don’t have a class list in electronic format, we’ve also streamlined the process of entering student names manually. So whichever way you create your classroom, it’s faster than ever.

Once you’ve set up your class, check out our all-new activity library. There are hundreds of awesome new activities to choose from, and a very handy new search box to quickly find what you’re looking for.

Well tell you more about it – plus some other amazing features coming down the pike – very soon!

In the first activity, Campaign Promises, students make a comic starring their avatar as a candidate, announcing what they will do for Canada if they’re elected on May 2nd.

In the second activity, The Canadian Election, students show their familiarity with the issues by giving voice to each of the party leaders and explaining their campaign message. Both activities include template comics for your students to build from so they don’t have to start their comics from scratch.

To assign either activity to your class, just log into your teacher account and look under Shared Activities in the Activities tab. You’ll find them both on the first page near the top of the list.

Election Day is less than 2 weeks away, so be sure to assign your election activities in time!

We’ve just added 5 new fonts to the comic builder! To use them in your comics, just drag a text bubble into your panel as usual, and then choose which font you want to use from the menu.

The next time you load the Comic Builder, drop your avatar – or any character – into a panel and  go to the new Outfits tab in the Art Library. You’ll find a bunch of new ensembles that you can drag right onto your character to change his or her clothes!

If you don’t find anything that quite matches your style, go to My Outfits and launch the awesome new Outfit Builder, where you can customize any combination of clothes from the library.

Save your new outfit when you’re done, and it’ll appear under My Outfits from now on, usable on any character any time. Enjoy!

A new batch of props is now available in the Art Library – City street objects and a whole bunch of tools!  With all these cool tools at their disposal, who knows what the students will build next…  Look for the new items in the Street and Tools collections in the Comic Builder’s  Art Library.