Using Pixton to develop writing and motivation

I decided to use Pixton as an innovative tool in class, in the hope that it could boost my students’ motivation when it comes to writing, and specially the motivation of those who are usually reluctant to write anything.   

                    

Taking into account that this tool was something completely new not just to my students, but also to me, I decided to design a task which could be accessible to students, and which at the same time would allow them to be creative to some extent. Bearing all this in mind, the task I prepared consisted in adapting a short story – chosen by students from a range of short stories and tales that they had previously read during this academic year – to comic, changing its ending.  

The main objectives set for this task were to further develop writing skills, to reinforce the use of specific language resources, to introduce my students to the use of Pixton and new technologies with didactic purposes, to summarize a story, to create dialogues, to boost motivation, and to promote creativity and collaborative work.  

In order to do so, I organized students into pairs and asked them to choose one of the stories they had previously read. Once chosen, each started to brainstorm and discuss the main ideas to be included in their comic, after which I asked them to prepare a basic mind map to help them with the organization of such ideas. As they worked on this stage, I walked around the class monitoring the different groups, and making sure they understood what exactly they needed to do and providing them with support when it was necessary.  

Next step was the elaboration of a storyboard. Before using Pixton, I thought it could be safer to make a draft for their comic, so that’s what we did. As a draft, each group elaborated a storyboard, containing the most relevant “scenes” they wanted to show in their comic, as well as including the narrative itself (mostly, dialogues). After that, and with my supervision, students used Pixton to actually design their comics.         

The use of this tool helped learners to achieve the goals set for this task, it turned out to be a quite appealing tool to most of my students. It contributed to boost teamwork, raise motivation, creativity and even autonomy, since the task required students to work together, make decisions, discuss personal choices, and finally design and create a story.  Creativity and the use of imagination were encouraged inasmuch as students were given freedom to choose from a wide array of options to create characters and scenarios, and to make up the end of the story. I guess this is precisely what my students most enjoyed: the use of Pixton itself to select colors and accessories… it was an entirely new world for them.

Once they finished their projects, I intended to share them on Google Classroom, which is the platform we normally use. However, I couldn’t because apparently, the free version of Pixton doesn’t offer this possibility. So what I did was to print the different projects and hang them on the walls around our classroom for everyone to see them.  

In the future, when I use Pixton in class, I’ll try to change the timing for this task. I feel the whole process was quite long, as it took several full sessions to develop this project. So, next time I’ll probably ask my students to finish it at home, maybe, this way also making sure that we have more time for co-evaluation and peer assessment.