A Useful Tool: Pixton

 

Hi everyone! Welcome to my last post of this academic year! Believe me, i will continue to share lots of ideas about English in my blog. As for today's post, i am going to introduce a useful tool called Pixton for your English teaching. So, What is Pixton? It is an online comic creation tool that allows your child to be creative and, at the same time, improve their reading and writing skills with both pictures and words. Using  online comic creator, kids can create professional-looking comic strips while learning about composition, illustration, and color.Your child may also collaborate with other members of the Pixton community around the world, to create comics and stories together.

How to use Pixton? Creating a Pixton comic is quite easy.There are a few basic concepts you should understand before you begin. Each comic you make is made up of a series of panels or scenes. Everything you do to create a comic is clicking buttons or directly clicking on the objects in the panel. What's great about Pixton,you can only see the buttons that relate to what you're doing. So, if i select a character, i will see a different set of buttons to select speech bubble, prop etc. Another key concept to understand is what we call ''modes''. If i click once on a character to select it, i now see five  different coloured buttons along the left side of the panel. Each of these buttons switches me to a different character mode. The mode that i select determines what happens when i click on the character. Anyway, you can get more information about this site by watching the video below.

 

I think, it is so funny to create comics via Pixton. I strongly recommend you to use it. Trust me, you will never regret integrating it into teaching and learning.

 

 

 

Zimmer Twins

Hi everyone! Today i'm going to introduce a tool called Zimmer Twins. I presented it with my partner Beyza in the classroom.It is really simple to use for both educators and kids.Now, let me make clear What is Zimmer Twins. Zimmer Twins is Children’s website.It helps you create animation videos for kids. The site's movie-making tool is designed around elements of sentence structure and creative expression, which reinforces reading and writing skills.The Zimmer Twins is known for its unique format which combines online participation. Its animations enhance almost any curriculum subject. 

  And how to use the Zimmer Twins? I am going to try to explain it step by step. Firstly, when you open the page you see a screen and you need to choose one of the two  options(kids or educators). We chose the second one. It isn’t a must to sign up the website but unless you sign up you can’t save your movies. In order to start to create your movie you need to click ''make a video''. If  you need to get some help you can click ''how to make a video'' and watch the introductory video. Or you can click ''make from scratch'' directly and proceed to make a video.You can change the character but you just have three options Edgar, Eva, 13( the cat). You can also change the background. Let’s pick an animation clip. There are four different types of clips to choose from. First, you can use the talk bubble clips to make the characters talk.These action clips let your characters walk, run, dance and more. Close up clips let your characters act surprised, happy or even scared. I mean you can add expressions to your characters. Let’s check the star clips. You can find headlines to use here. You can also arrange your animations on the timeline. If you change your mind about the order of your clip, click and drop it the new location. If you want a longer animation just add another clip right after.  After all, in order to save your movie you can click ''save movie'' and you can give a name to it.

  Furthermore you can add students to your class . With a free membership, you can add only up to five students to your class. As for classroom implication of Zimmer Twins, it is a fun way to incorporate technology into the classroom. Watch your students, become junior movie producers, practice proper writing habits and expand their vocabulary.
Here is an example of animation video created by Zimmer Twins.

 

Unfortunately, there are some limitations of this site. You can add only up to five students to your class, create maximum of 12 movies,  make pre-scripted comments.There is simple content moderation and no sound clip in the videos. Also, students can't edit their movies with free membership and it is not possible to embed your video. You can only share it with e-mail. Consequently, We as future teachers, definitely recommend you to use it for your edutaining.
Here is a video to learn how to use Zimmer Twins.