ESL / EFL Teaching Tip: Using Pixton.com

Описание: This is Autumn Clark, the Deputy Head of Teacher Training at Rennert International, giving some tips on how to use the website pixton.com.

Transcript:

Autumn:Hi, there! This week I would like to share with you a fun website that I learned about at the TESOL 2013 conference and it's called Pixton.com. It's a great site that you can use with your students to create comics basically for free. You can create them and share them for free. If you want to print them out sometimes there is a tiny charge, but either way they can create them and share them through email; or embed them onto a website; or share them on facebook or any number of things. And it can be a really fun way to practice genre writing in your class; incorporate a fun writing activity in your class; or even have them synthesize listening material in a fun and new way. Something really cool about pixton.com is that you do not need to know how to draw in order to create a comic. So, right now I'm just going to show you the website a little bit.

So, here's pixton.com. When you first sign up or sign in you'll start off on your home page which will have a bunch of different comics and then it will also have the easy steps for getting started—creating a comic; publishing a comic; and then creating your pixture which is basically your avatar. They have a lot of really helpful videos in terms of how to create a comic, so I really suggest watching those. I'm not going too much into this right now, but they have all sorts of different formats here in terms of the type of comics you can create. And if you just want to go to Quickie, it already has everything almost done for you—backgrounds, characters, speech bubbles...that sort of thing. So, if I click on this one, I can choose 2 characters that I want to be in the scene. Then it will load and it will automatically put them in, and so if I click on this it will update it with the characters (clicks), and it will update it with the characters (clicks), and it will update it with the characters. And then, on the side here once you click on a panel it gives you all of your editing buttons where you can add in speech and you can move them around. If you click on anything, you can always move him up or down or whatever you want. You can change the background, double-click on a speech bubble and type and then you can add your text in there. And then you can save for later if you haven't finished it and then it will be here basically saved in your comics--right over here. And then you can always edit it and add to it later. So, I just wanted to show you that really quick. I hope you find pixton.com helpful and you are able to use it to motivate and inspire your students to have a fun writing activity.