A web-based tool: Pixton!

Hello, everyone! Today, I will introduce you with a very useful and funny educational tool, Pixton.
Pixton is a web-based tool where you can create comics online and users of it can create accounts via three options: for fun, for schools, for business but I want to talk about the second one,the option for schools because it is the one that concerns us as educators, I think. Pixton for schools allows for a private and secure space where teachers can moderate the creations of the students and publish them and it can be used through a school code in Premium version after 50 day-trial duration. Now let's have a look how it works step by step:


1) For example, you chose the option for schools as I did, you should click on the enter button and then;



2) Click on "Sign up"



3) After you create an account, log in as I demonstrated below:

4) And after clicking on my comics, you can start either by creating a comic or creating a character but I started with "create a new comic" 
After you start creating a comic or a character , you have many options to choose layout again as you can see below (but I chose the comic strip):

5) Once you decide on the layout, firstly you can create your own character, choose any community one which other people created or add preset characters which require payment. And then, you can choose a background. After that you can see at the right, we have some buttons that enable us to make some changes if we wish. Let me talk about them. First one, move mode, enables you to move the characters, backgrounds, or props etc. and in the second one, green mode, you can change the expressions&poses of the characters and you can do that by dragging or clicking on the parts of the character ( head, body,hands etc.) also. In the third one, orange mode, you can edit appearances of the characters or props. The fourth one, pink mode, allows you to edit proportion of props or characters again. And the last one, color wheel mode, allows changing the colors on select items. And you can go on by adding new panels if you wish.

And there are some other things which make the creating process easier. There are some buttons in yellow mode as you see below. In this mode you can insert new items into your scene.( For example; characters, props, speech bubbles and text, backgrounds or images you uploaded. And at the right half side of the picture, you see some tabs, too; for example, view zoom which allows editing the panel at a larger size or you can use the camera zoom tab to adjust how far you want to zoom in or out of the scene and to enable panning( moving which part  of the scene the camera "sees") by just clicking once or clicking again to disable. And also you have more option button which views options like flip, color etc. Once you are done enough or you are in creating process ( it doesn't matter actually), you can save your work in progress
 by just clicking "Save for later" If you want any changes in your work, you can by clicking "edit settings"





After you're done with your work, you can embed it on your blog/website and share it on the social media or just email it which require no payment but you can download it, print it or just publish it, of course in premium version.

Pixton for schools is not actually just a web-based tool which enable students to create their own distinct comics; it is more than that because it not only makes students share their ideas but also boosts their imagination while making them have fun at the same time. But i must say that it is not for very young learners; it's just suitable for teens and adults only because young learners would be confused while creating comics.

How this tool can be used in language teaching?

• You can ask students to make creating an autobiography(different scenes of their lives which maybe includes their own photos)
• You can create a comic which has some empty bubbles and ask students to fill in them.
• After you cover a literary text, you may assign students with a task where they will transform a short story or a play etc. into a comic. 
• Students can tell about their dreams or a day they want to live in one day.

There are many ways to use Pixton but it is of course based on you and your purposes, as well. This tool is a way of a medium which students express their ideas and can work collaboratively and I really recommend it to all educator as a pre-service teacher. I created an example of comic strip layout and prepared a video about how to use it briefly step by step below. Hope you like it. See you!

Picture Reference:
http://myenglishimages.com