Comic Strip Making Technology

I have explored the website www.pixton.com, which is a website for students to create comic strips. While exploring the website I created a comic and learned how to use the technology. Creating my comic was not hard after I explored and played around on the website. There were three difficult aspects of this technology that took me a little longer to figure out than the rest of the technology. These two most difficult aspects were thinking of a story and positioning the characters. My suggestion to teachers and students who want to make a comic are to brainstorm what you want to say in your comic. The next step is to map out what you want to say in each panel, and then figure out how to put it in as few words as possible so it will fit in the panel. It is important to remember to be very precise so the comic is not too crowded. The speech bubbles are only so big and at first I struggled to fit all the words in them. Once I figured out that I need to keep it short and to the point the words fit in the speech bubbles and my comic flowed much better. The second aspect that I struggled with while making my comic was the fact that the characters are pre-set to face a certain way. For example, if I wanted the character on the left side of the panel, but they were preset facing right then the person would be talking to the side of the panel instead of the other character. This was very frustrating, but after playing on the website for a little while I figured out that on pixton.com you could rotate certain parts of the body so they were facing the way that you wanted them to. In order to do this you need to double click on the body part and rotate it the way you want it to face. The only downfall to this is that you can’t rotate the whole character; you have to rotate each body part individually. The last aspect that I struggled with was being able to get all of the information spaced correctly on the panel. Playing around with the characters and speech bubbles easily solved this problem and I figured out how to space these things correctly. The struggles that I experienced were masked by the benefits I saw in the comic book making technology. Some features of the comic strip making technology that I enjoyed were that there were about thirty pre-set backgrounds and if you couldn’t find anything that you liked you could download images from the Internet. This is beneficial because the students can show that they understand a concept or a book based mainly on pictures. Even if they struggle with writing they can show they understand because this technology is not solely based on text. Another thing that I liked was that there were many different panel sizes to choose from. You could create comics as small as one panel or as large as twelve panels. I like this technology
I really liked this technology because it is useful to many different types of students. Comic strip making technology is beneficial for students who struggle in reading and writing. In this technology students can show comprehension or the understanding of a topic by the sequence of pictures and the text would be secondary. Since comics have few words the students would have to pull the important meaning out of the text and use as few words as possible to convey the meaning. Overall I think pixton.com will be very beneficial to my classroom and I will definitely have my students create comics to see if they comprehend books or understand a certain subject.