Pixton: (your) comic generator and owner

The PhD thesis is writing me (no sic, intended), I hope that excuses my [forced - painful] blog silence.

A year ago I published a post on comic strip generators with ideas for the foreign language classroom. Today, I’m going to post about YACG…or yet another comic generator: Pixton (via L’Atelier).

Pixton is a comic generator application aimed at young audiences (kids and teens). Pixton provides us with 3 different types of application:

Pixton for Fun: for everyone. You need to register for an account (that requires parents’ email and phone). What I like about Piston is their focus on the community since they allow you to share, and more important, remix other people’s creations.

Pixton for Schools: Pixton gives you the option of setting up a sort of walled VLE for your own school groups and classes plus access to a bank of resources, but this isn’t free. A yearly subscription is around 250$.

Collaborative Pixton: More or less the same, a private web-based environment for teamworking. You have to contact the company if interested in this option.

So for the common end user interested in free 2.0 tools, there’s only one option: Pixton for Fun. However, despite that feature I like (i.e.remixing), I’d recommend you to choose another comic generator application. Why? First of all, the option for schools is not free, so you’d have to use the general one, Pixton for Fun, whose drag-and-drop interface is as easy as others, but whose graphics are poorer than the applications I reviewed a year ago. But, most importantly, I read their Terms of Agreement (yes, that small print almost no one reads) and this is what I got:

I guess most of the sites I’ve registered to have the same clause but a couple of months ago I decided to lead by example and started to read the terms of agreement. What if you decide to include those comic strips in a textbook or your students decide to sell printed merchandise with them?

Comics can be a great way of practicing storytelling techniques and constructive creation (by remixing existing comic strips) and might empower learners developing their sense of agency and autonomy. But before you consider using this or that application, go through the Terms of Agreement, and work through the interface options. You never know which devil you’re selling your soul to, ;).

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