Community reviews for Pixton

I really like Pixton for a few reasons. It is a few clicks of the mouse to set up a class account, and it is very simple for the students to join our class. I also love that they technically don't need to share anything with me since I can view all of my students' works in my class account. My students were able to fly through creating comics with these. Because the interface is pretty user-friendly, they could focus most on content which is what is important to me. Students have a lot of creative license with this tool. This isn't the greatest tool for students who need extra support, however. There are so many options that these students can get lost easily and sometimes aren't sure where to begin.

Pixton is a great way to infuse creativity and higher-order thinking skills through comic creation. Students get to change the setting, choose their characters, and add text. I like that when I gave it as an assignment to an advanced group of students they needed no step by step instruction as they were able to jump right in and start creating. Student projects can be printed and shared with other classes or shared online. When sharing them with a larger audience, we noticed that students did a much better job on their work. There are many ways I can see teachers using Pixton in the classroom.

It is a very easy web 2.0 application to use, it is fun and user friendly. As a teaching tool it is great to address literacy and content presented in variety of formats, incorporating technology into your repertoire. Encourages students to create, collaborate and publish their work online, demonstrating what they have learned in your subject area.

An easy way to allow students to express a story visually without the fear of drawing. Student expression was fostered via the many tools and pre-made types of avatars that they could use to express themselves. In addition, thought bubbles act to use text to further the story and give the look and feel of a graphic novel. With time, there are many tutorials available to advance the look of the Pixton comic.

My kids LOVED using Pixton to learn some in-depth pieces of story telling. I was able to teach dialogue and matching facial or body expressions easily. This gave my students an opportunity to have fun with characters and props to think out their stories instead of having to just use words to brainstorm how their plots would go. It also allowed them to use facial expressions to actually show that a character was angry or happy, which then prompted to me to remind them to "show it in words" on their final story. The tools were a little tricky to learn at first, but once they learned them, the kids were beyond creative with the things they could come up with.

both the students and myself enjoyed the basic idea but when we dove into the actual creation, we found that the features that sounded so neat (extensive manipulations of characters & backgrounds) were really very tedious & difficult.

There are a number of web-based comic creators, and Pixton seems to be a leader. Don't get me wrong - it's an incredibly powerful and versatile tool! I love the myriad sets and props. The strongest feature is the characters – they’re completely customizable in body structure, facial expression, and positions. I’ve seen some high school and college students use Pixton to create story summaries or history reports. But for most students under 16, that complexity makes it less than optimal for educational use. There are just too many rabbit trails for a young student to get lost on.

Pixton is not alone in offering this type of functionality but there are many more options for users than some similar programmes. A fairly easy-to-use system that lets non-artists create authentic looking and sounding comics. Quick to sign up and get started.

Pros: Using Pixton, students can create engaging and detailed comics for any subject area. There is a plethora of backgrounds, characters, and props and the site maintains an excellent help feature. This is a fabulous tool to use for retelling stories, changing endings to stories, and sharing research with others (think Power Point or Prezi, but more engaging). An added bonus for users of Google for Education is that Pixton supports single sign-in. Cons: Price. Hopefully, they will come up will a better, meaning more reasonable, pricing scheme. The only other downfalls are that it does take a little bit of time to get the hang of creating the comics and students will need to be supervised closely or they will spend more time creating the comic due to the vast options available than they will putting together their ideas for the comic.

This is a great way for students to create.