Monday, July 18, 2011

Toondoo

Toondoo

The next tool that I am evaluating is Toondoo.

“Toondoo is a wacky way to get creative with comics.  Create! Share! Embed them in blogs!”
www.toondoo.com

Upon first site it was clear that this site was not inviting me in as an educator.  A with the previous games/tools that I have evaluated, they all had some sort of pitch on the main page to describe how I could use their tool in an educational setting.  This was not the case for Toondoo.  Never the less I was drawn to this program because my daughter had used it in grade 5 and I was trying to find something similar to Bubble Dialogue that was recommended in the current text that I am reading “Psychology of Learning for Instruction”.  Since Bubble Dialogue didn’t seem to be in current existence I went for a name that I was familiar with.  Thus, we are arriving at Toondoo.

General Thoughts:
I didn't find this the easiest tool to use.  There were no quick help video tutorials walking you through the main parts of the program.  There is a help wikki link but I didn't find it particularly helpful, and as will all programs like this I did find some very inappropriate comic strips that I wouldn't be able to control if the students decided to view them.  It also wasn't the the fastest program to load, so perhaps if many students were trying to access this site at the same time there may be some issues with bandwidth.

Thumbs up or Thumbs down
For now I will give the site a thumbs up for the potential learning benefits of this type of program.  But in the future I might have to reverse my decision if I find a more user friendly comic strip generator. 


Possible Benefits: 
 In any case, I really wanted to try to use a program like this for the benefits suggested in the text I referenced above:
  • allows students to create conversations and thoughts that might not be said out loud
  • allows students to look at a situation from multiple perspectives
  • facilitates literacy
Jones, Price, and Shelby did a study on "a comparative study of how a group of children with emotional and behavioural difficulties and children who attend a mainstream school use Bubble Dialogue to express themselves and the strategies used by the children to resolve interpersonal conflicts".  Again, here I am using Toondoo and Bubble Dialogue as though they do the same task.

Rajendran and Mitchell also did a study on the use of Bubble Dialogue with students with Asperger's syndrome to look at social functioning and cognitive performance as well as assessing their quality of communication.  They found that using Bubble Dialogue offered the students an opportunity to slow down and think about their communication and revise and change as needed.

"The results from this study suggest that future research needs to be directed at developing experiential interventions, and investigating their efficacy in improving social understanding in individuals with Asperger's syndrome. Furthermore, the use of computer software, like Bubble Dialogue, provides an engaging and humanistic way of facilitating this.." (Rajendran and Mitchell, 2000, pg 205)


    Alas, I created a toondoo book to see how this program might work in a Psychology 20 class when exploring the different perspectives of the various social psychologists.  

    And please do let me know if you know of a program similar to Toondoo that is a bit easier to use.


    biemrac



    Freudian Perspective by biemrac | Make your own at www.toondoo.com


    References:

    www.toondoo.com

    Exploring children’s responses to interpersonal conflict using bubble dialogue in a mainstream and EBD school:  Ann Jones, Emma Price and Carolyn Selby

    doi:10.1016/S0360-1315(97)00081-X


    Computer mediated interaction in Asperger's syndrome: the
    Bubble Dialogue program:  Gnanathusharan Rajendran*, Peter Mitchell

    Driscoll, M. P., 2005, Psychology of Learning for  Instruction, Pearson Education, Inc.
    Posted by at

    1 comment:

    Mrs. Foster said...

    Hi Racquel,

    Great blog! ToonDoo is an excellent online tool, but it takes a great deal of time to learn how to effectively use it.

    Pros:
    - The product quality is fantastic--students can easily create professional looking cartoons and are proud of their final products.
    - Students are highly motivated to use ToonDoo and can create cartoons to meet learning objectives in many classes.
    - There are a variety of backgrounds, characters, and props to choose from; the galleries are also updated quite often.
    - Users can import images from their computer to use as backgrounds, props, etc.

    Cons:
    - Learning how to use the program is time consuming. Luckily, I had another teacher walk me through the process. Once I gave my students a crash course on ToonDoo, they learned best by playing around on it and experimenting with its various features.
    - In order to have more control over student accounts, I had to sign up for "ToonDoo Spaces" which, of course, is not free. ToonDoo Spaces charges the administrator (teacher) on a "per user" basis.
    - Some props (alcohol, etc.) and avatars (busty women with short shorts and low cut tops) push the boundaries of being "school appropriate"--luckily with ToonDoo Spaces, you can limit access to these options, but need to go through each category to do so.
    - Bandwidth is a MAJOR issue. Students needed to save often for fear of their computers freezing and losing their progress. Getting everyone into ToonDoo at the beginning of class was also a hassle; at times, students easily lost 5-7 minutes of class time waiting for their cartoons to load.
    - We had numerous issues with sizing and printing...I could go on for hours about how inconvenient it is to print students' cartoons!

    In summary, I think ToonDoo is a great online tool to use at the middle and high school levels if you can get past the hassles of implementation.

    Thanks!
    Megan

    July 26, 2011 at 10:28 AM

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