Hi, my name is Melinda, one of the owners here at Tech4Learning and I'm excited to showcase some of the new features in Wixie. In the past years we have released a very large update over the course of the summer. This year was a little bit different in that we made a lot of smaller key feature releases during the year based on requests from people and also everyone telling us that their students would be able to work on this as long as we didn't change the interface.
So without further ado, let me share some of the other features on the list or some of the new features. The coloring book color is one of the most exciting ones. This just came out recently but there's object placeholders that make it easier especially if you work with really young students.
Talkies 2.0 as you can see in the frog there allow you to make talking characters from original art and photos. Wixie has an entirely new mind mapping tool. There's so many things in here.
Rather than talk about them all, let me show you how they work. And I mentioned before there is a coloring book color and let me go ahead and just demo this. I have a sample here and when you to see the coloring book color you need to choose the paintbrush.
And I'm just going to switch to this tool a moment. I like that way that looks a little better. The coloring book color is sort of a magic color and what that means is when you paint with that tool, let me do this.
That sort of looks like a nice, you know what, let me undo that twice. Oh, the undo buttons, those also move to the top. That was based on request.
So I hope you enjoy that because we did that based on what people said they needed. Okay, so here's my coloring book right here. And that's an ice cream cone in case you couldn't tell.
And let's just make a big smiley face next to it. There we go. So what the coloring book color does is it draws outlines just very similar to the black color on the color palette, but this one operates differently.
And you can really see that when I use other colors to color things in. So I'm going to choose this and I'm going to go inside this. And it's hard to see, but my color, my brush is going all the way across this document and not just touching that.
So whatever color I start in, the black doesn't get overwritten. And also, whoops, although you saw I started outside that, we can undo that. I'm going to do this here and it colors inside there.
And you can really see this happen when I color behind it, because if I start on the outside, I can drag all the way across that. And again, those black lines are protected as is anything that's inside of it. I can still use the paint bucket if I wanted to highlight something along those lines.
But again, very easy to constrain that. It's great for making coloring book pages. It's great for also making sure that you preserve black lines and that they can't be erased.
But there's all sorts of fun sort of hidden keyboard commands in that. And we'll be releasing some blogs and some help files that will show you how to do that. But that is the new Magic Coloring Book color.
And again, black is a regular color. The Magic Coloring Book color is in the paintbrush and it is the small sun on the side. And again, that allows you to create a black that is protected.
Oh, you'll see some of these also are now in a lot of other coloring book style things. So again, these are already set to be a coloring book. So if I wanted to start drawing and painting in these, you can see I can drag across those.
Again, all of this will still function with the paint bucket tool, but it just makes it a little easier. Easy for color by numbers. Great for comics so that you can really constrain.
Students can draw all their own artwork, but it will constrain within the panels and also won't cover those panels. Another one is object placeholders. And the note here says it's not available to students.
And that's not necessarily true because it's specifically for students. It is not available as a feature for students. So if I am in an example here, you can sort of see, I'm going to show you how it works as if I was a student.
What happens now is when I add an object placeholder or there is one in a template that my teacher assigned or that you find in the templates library. When I go ahead and use that, I simply have to click that piece and it will grab my photo and will add. Three, two, one, smile.
There we go. And it puts it in that shape and it does that. So the difference is all I have to do in any of these is click the box.
That one's going to do a video. These will take pictures with my camera. I can send it to add an image, add a sticker, add a talkie, and it will essentially bypass students having to use the buttons to be able to do that.
As a teacher, you find this in the, actually I'm going to jump back to edit mode a moment because then I get to show a new feature too. If you go to widgets, there's an option here to do a placeholder and you can see there's that placeholder on the screen. I can choose on the side whether I want it to be take a photo right away.
You can see all the shapes that I have with that one or if I wanted it to capture a video or jump right to the talkie page or if you wanted to select a project or a webpage, that's great for portfolios. Again, the placeholders are really designed to help you use Wixie with students who don't know how to use it yet or the really young learners to be able to do that. This is a fun new feature.
You can thank Michelle Wendt at Follow Hills for this. When you present now, there is also a storyboard so you can jump to other pages in a project which makes it a little bit easier to present and to share things. So this is the other one and this one came out actually quite a bit ago but we're finding that not everybody knows that this is a possibility and it's sort of hidden on the toolbar.
So this is a Talkies 2.0. We know we love the talkies and you can get to the regular talkies from the widgets button and add a fun talking character here but with the new widgets or with the new Talkie 2.0, I can turn anything on my page into a talkie. So I have the student drawn artwork here and on the options panel on the side, there is a talkie button here to the side and I'm going to go ahead and select that. There we go.
And what I'm allowed to do now is move this mouth and I'm sorry using my cursor here. There we go and try it and you can see that I can make all my painted artwork talk. Now when I save it, it will go back and it's just like other options where I can record my voice, type something in or if I had a text box on the page, it would do that.
Now this also works with objects, I mean sorry, photos of kids. So I could take a picture of this photo and go to talkies. Whoops, sorry, I didn't mean to select it.
I just need to select the photo. There we go and talkie and it will create a mouth. Oh, this is pretty good because when you use a photograph of a person, especially if it's close up, it usually is pretty good at finding the mouth itself.
So you can see how that works. Similarly, you can turn any object into a talkie. So if I wanted to make this particular photo a talkie, I could give a mouth to the Liberty Bell.
There we go. Move that right along here and again you could try it and you can see now I can have a talking mouth and then that mouth would be able to say hello or something quick or not. I'm not typing so well.
There we go. Hello and you can see that it talks. So I could do a first person story about U.S. symbols to tell how they feel or what they might, animals could be talking, but again animated storybooks, your fairy tales, everything can sort of come to life with that talkies 2.0 and again the process is select the object if it's a photo or if you painted artwork, select a box around the face, add those handles for your mouth and then it just turn it into a talkie.
One of the other great tools, I'm not going to open any of these, are some of the mind mapping tools. So several of us, I don't know if you know this, we several of us worked many, many years ago in the 90s and there was a program called inspiration that let you do mind mapping and there really isn't a great tool for that. There's a lot of tools out there that do similar things but they're not, they're set up for business, not for kids and so we decided to add a mind mapping tool in Wixie and in order to turn that on you can either go to the new button on your thing and say mind maps or on that project prompts at your teacher dashboard, there is a button that allows you to open a set of templates.
So when I start a mind map, let me go ahead and this, I just opened a template demo here, let me open this template and let's just say summer fun and if I think of summer fun, I'm just gonna hold on the key here and pop a new one out and I'm gonna go ice cream. You can see I drew that before but I might also say add a symbol. I want my symbol to say we're gonna go to the beach and actually I also in the summer like to go see family so I'm actually going to go here and go family and see if I can put family here and let's just grab a family picture and we'll add that in.
Oops sorry, I said cancel instead and so what I'm sorry, we'll go from here, we're gonna go here and we're gonna highlight that and let's go ahead and add a different image and we'll add that. Sorry let me go back in there, there's my family oh and there's many many options within here so I could turn a label on, it already said family, I could change it to be whatever it wants and I will just go say my aunt and uncle and you'll see I added this as a symbol but now it's not attached so I could go to summer fun and highlight that and drag that back in there. I can change the color on all of these different things, make things easy and approachable that way so nice quick things that I can take care of there.
So that's the easy way to do some of that quick mind mapping, very straightforward. Again you can use it to highlight or identify a sequence of events, you could easy way to create a timeline. I love it for project work where kids can do some brainstorming and just throw out all of their ideas there and I didn't actually show this but you can move things around and change links and change colors and organize into categories and subcategories which you can sort of see in some of these here.
There's a great one that's just a vocabulary word web so they did you know how things are similar, different synonyms, antonyms, etc and make those links. You can use images, you can use animations, you can add video in there. Some teachers I have even seen have used this as a way for kids to do video response and they all put video responses in because you can still use that team feature with this so it doesn't have to just be an individual student, it can be a lot of students working on their project as well.
Another request, this one comes from Adam Strachan in Fairfax. He wanted a way to be able to save and share collections of student work long after students have left his classroom. I think they ended up doing a lot of book trailers and he had some of these great book trailers and he wanted to make sure he could include those in the future and so I'm actually going to jump back out into my dashboard again and go home for a moment and if I wanted to do that I'm going to go visit my students and let's go to fourth grade.
Actually what I probably want to do is look at, oh let's just say advice. Oh this is a great one because just in case, if I have my fifth graders especially, I'm going to just search for advice and these are, so they did advice, my students did advice for kids coming next year and we're going to go ahead and say I want to see all, I went over here to the far right and show projects from the entire class at once. What I can now do is select those projects and then send them using the project wizard.
This is sort of a newer one too, this was out the earlier last year in 2024, but not everybody has used this, but what the project wizard allows me to do is collect a whole bunch of projects together very quickly. I could print QR codes, that's great, but what I really want to do is send these to a showcase folder and I wanted to add it to my school showcase so that it is there and I'm just going to add it loose. I should, I could have made a new folder, that's probably what I should have done, but make a folder and then when I go back to my school showcase, you'll see they are here and now I, there's an easy way to do that.
You see I collected interviews before as well, so I can now send and share this particular folder, create a QR code to it and again send that information to my families, go back into future years, a great way to collect high quality projects, but if your students have made real world community projects, this is a great way to make sure you don't lose any of that as your students get older and age out of Wixie if your school doesn't continue to use it at middle school and back in the high school grades. Let me go back in here and again we can just go to show, I love this feature here where I can adjust, jump in my storyboard and jump to any part of my project. So there are so many additional changes.
I don't know if anybody's started to use favorites to identify the templates that they love. So you can also copy them to your my projects, especially if you customize, you're going to definitely want to do that, but a lot of times I'll use like a Venn diagram and I, you know, just that way it's easy for me to find it and assign it to my kids and they know how to add all the details to it. So having some of those in the favorites just makes it easy to assign.
So now you can assign from your favorites folder. There's a nice button there that makes it a little bit easier. You can also assign to all students in all classes if you are a tech teacher who maybe teaches four groups of fourth grade classes.
So instead of having to go class by class you can just say all classes. Lots of fun features that way. There's one of the other new ones is object shapes and cropping.
So here's a picture here and if I wanted it to fit in this frame, let me just make this frame a little bigger, you know, I can sort of center that a little bit and it looks okay, but what I really want to do is I don't want that that part of the photo to hang out around it. So I'm going to go down here and I am going to go to crop and you see that I can choose where the center of my image needs to be. I'll make it a little bit taller so it's square and I'm going to narrow it up a little bit.
Okay, let's put it right there. That way when I say done it shows as just that one particular piece so I can adjust it that way. I could also change the shape of that.
There's lots of different options that way but you see here at the top of my filters I can turn it into a heart. Nice way to do that and you know what it's not quite centered anymore so I'm going to go back over here and say you know what I want to edit the cropping mass and I want to move that oh maybe just to his face there. Let's narrow that up a little bit and make it a little bit smaller that way and again I can adjust those kinds of things.
So lots of subtle new features. You'll notice that down here in that left button there's a lot more options here. The layering is right here.
Some of the other options, let me just grab two of these quick. I don't know if this is a nice keyboard shortcut. Alt key will duplicate.
Option key if you're on a Mac but if I have two objects on the page and I just drug across both of them you see I also have some alignment options where I can make changes to that very quickly. That's also new but again so many features under here to be able to work through those things. The translate options if you haven't used the translation options in that.
That's not going to work so well on a picture but if I have text boxes I have translate options in this feature or in this location also. Oh I didn't replace that object but again if I had this nice heart and I wanted a different photo I just say replace the object and it puts a new one in there. That is also true if you create those placeholders for kids.
They take a photo they don't want it. They can also then go to that those three dots in the lower left corner and say replace the object. I want to be able to do something different within that space.
So that's quite a few of the features. Again maybe it's not everything but if you go over to your learning center oh you'll see I took I just took this shot this morning the screenshot of today's webinar and then but the latest updates are always at the top and there's also a place to sign up for the Wixie newsletter. I'm going to jump into the learning center and show this a minute but I already signed up for the Wixie newsletter so it doesn't show for me but if you haven't signed up for the Wixie newsletter yet that is the place to go.
So if I'm going to go back to my home page and we are going to go to the learning center all of the updates show up here at the top and if you go to any of the new features there you'll see in the coloring book I did that really really quickly. Here's a little bit more detail about how it works and then there's also you could upload your own coloring pages that's really fun and there's a new that make sure you uncheck uses a background so that you can do that coloring book page option but the showcase feature all of those instructions are here with links to the help and again that's in the learning center. All of the recent updates are listed at the top to make it easy to find and the other place and it would show up down here in the lower left corner for you to subscribe to the Wixie newsletter that we we don't send out a lot of them but we send them out about once a month and they most often include recent updates and then some timely sort of resources and features like webinars that are coming up and other new things that we're creating for example there's now a new gifted guide thanks to the team at humble isd they're helping me put that together writing across the curriculum just went in because I also did that presentation in humble isd and I think there's a new I'm working on a new world language because we've some requests for world language teachers who are using the speaking reading writing tools or the tools in Wixie to support reading speaking writing in second languages in their second language instruction so that's a brief summary of everything that is in here so thank you very much for joining me for the updates and if you have any questions you can also go over to your profile icon and choose help most of those things have been put in the the middle here but you can search at the top for any of those things too and again back to that learning center and those updates at the top well thank you very much happy creating have a great summer and we can't wait to see what your students create as they go back to school in the fall take care.
