PIXTON

 Hi eveyone!

I have used Pixton to create a comic with my class (2nd ESO)

Using Pixton has been a little bit confusing at the beginning. It took a whole lesson to explain to students all the things it has. I organized my 30 students in groups of three and four. I let them choose the groups so that they could work comfortably. The rule they had was that nobody could work alone and they had to make sure that everyone had someone to work with. 

First of all, I dedicated one lesson to know how to use Pixton. I showed them that they could change face expressions, poses, eyes direction, etc. At the same time students were with the school computers so that they could put into practice what I was showing them in class. 

Then, the second session, students had to plan the comic before creating it. There was one rule: they had to use will & going to. This was the grammar we were dealing with in that unit. Then, I gave them two lessons to do the comics. One problem I found was that some groups finished the comic in the first session. With these groups, I asked them to have a look at others’ comics and see how they could be improved. Finally, they had to present their comics in class. In the second session, half an hour was free so I took that opportunity to ask them to create their own avatar and then, we created a photo of the class. 

Among the objectives that I wanted to fulfill, we can find: to read and understand specific information from written texts in different communicative situations. Being able to express their ideas writing in the foreign language. Another key objective would be to develop the learner's autonomy, think about the learning processes and apply knowledge and communication strategies acquired from other languages to the target one. This would be accomplished by using this video since students will be constantly asked questions throughout the video not only for checking their understanding of it, but also for making them reflect upon their own learning so that they know in which ways they learn best. Using learning strategies and available resources such as ICT and audiovisual media was another objective to fulfill. Finally, valuing the foreign language as a means of access to information and as a tool for learning different contents and developing the ability of learning to learn. Furthermore, using the foreign language as a tool of communication and understanding among people of diverse origin and culture is a very important objective to fulfill. 

The use of the tool helped students to achieve these objectives that I had just mentioned by having to write in English. They were also given the opportunity of looking for examples of sentences in future tense in their books so that they read in the foreign language so that they could show they understand everything. They applied they knowledge they had from all the unit (grammar, vocabulary…) by creating the comic. What’s more, they used ICT by using Pixton to create the comic. 

What students liked the most was creating their own avatars and making them feel free to invent their own story. Some students even invented they were going to go to Canada the following year as exchange students. I think that what they enjoyed the least was that the ones that finished earlier (fast-finishers) were a bit bored even though they had to supervise others’ work, it was a bit boring for them. It was my first time, for the next time I would definitely have this into account and have any other activities for fast finishers. 

Finally, as I mentioned before, there was a last session in which students had to present their comic to the class and, as always, they were asked to co-evaluate the other students comic. 

Here a attach an example of a comic and the picture we created with all the avatars from the class.