Cartoons are making a comeback!
So I love memes, (like a large part of society) and I try to use them whenever possible, but sometimes you have more information to share than what a mere meme will allow. For that, we have... comic strips! I test drove 3 websites that allow users to make their own cartoons and I have thoughts and opinions about them all.
This first one was made using Pixton. Pros and cons, people. Pro: Pixton would be great for having students create a digital comic strip to represent something or summarize something. Con: The free version comes with next to nothing to work with. My comic person (who I THOROUGHLY enjoyed making and was fully customizable) is stuck in a dorm-like room because that was one of the 4 options available. If you are willing to buy the packs with more options, they run about $15 each. BUT, you can set up class groups on there and have students log into your Pixton account and create toons, so that's a big plus (especially if you can get your department to pay for some of it). You are able to add as many cells as necessary though, and that is a great feature. It felt much like PowerPoint to me. Very neat, but definitely not my favorite because of the limitations for us plebians.
Make Beliefs Comix (yes I spelled all that "correctly")
Although the name of this site drove me nuts, I actually liked it. Free. No logging in or setting up an account. Just click and go.The art is very cartoony, but cute, and a little limited but it looks like they are adding to the options. I feel like you can get away with having a cheesier cartoon with the cutesy art available. Big Plus: There are links to all kinds of things that can help you out in a classroom, library or at home as a parent. You can really tell that the website is there for the holistic betterment of the children and that gives it brownie points.
ToonDoo was an interesting experience with my dinosaur internet. It. took. forever. For the app window to load, for the images to load for me to look through them, for it to save etc. If you have modern, 2019 internet you should be fine. But us country folk have to beware. I thought the layout of the app looked really neat until I started to actually look through the options. There are a lot of them! They are somewhere between cartoony and decent drawings that make you want to build them in to a half-way decent cartoon. There was a little learning-curve with all the options for manipulating the toons (which I did not figure them all out) but it seems easy enough to figure out. You are limited to how many cells you can have, since you choose that in the beginning. There are tons of accessory items to add to your toon that can help make it detailed.
This first one was made using Pixton. Pros and cons, people. Pro: Pixton would be great for having students create a digital comic strip to represent something or summarize something. Con: The free version comes with next to nothing to work with. My comic person (who I THOROUGHLY enjoyed making and was fully customizable) is stuck in a dorm-like room because that was one of the 4 options available. If you are willing to buy the packs with more options, they run about $15 each. BUT, you can set up class groups on there and have students log into your Pixton account and create toons, so that's a big plus (especially if you can get your department to pay for some of it). You are able to add as many cells as necessary though, and that is a great feature. It felt much like PowerPoint to me. Very neat, but definitely not my favorite because of the limitations for us plebians.
Make Beliefs Comix (yes I spelled all that "correctly")
Although the name of this site drove me nuts, I actually liked it. Free. No logging in or setting up an account. Just click and go.The art is very cartoony, but cute, and a little limited but it looks like they are adding to the options. I feel like you can get away with having a cheesier cartoon with the cutesy art available. Big Plus: There are links to all kinds of things that can help you out in a classroom, library or at home as a parent. You can really tell that the website is there for the holistic betterment of the children and that gives it brownie points.
ToonDoo was an interesting experience with my dinosaur internet. It. took. forever. For the app window to load, for the images to load for me to look through them, for it to save etc. If you have modern, 2019 internet you should be fine. But us country folk have to beware. I thought the layout of the app looked really neat until I started to actually look through the options. There are a lot of them! They are somewhere between cartoony and decent drawings that make you want to build them in to a half-way decent cartoon. There was a little learning-curve with all the options for manipulating the toons (which I did not figure them all out) but it seems easy enough to figure out. You are limited to how many cells you can have, since you choose that in the beginning. There are tons of accessory items to add to your toon that can help make it detailed.
These sites would be great tools to use to build cartoons to share with students and coworkers in the library. They would make great visual how-to toons for short processes, advertisements for new workshops or materials available, or flyers for events to be held in the library. I think it would be great if readers made book advertisements out of them to post on a special display in the library OR maybe staff members could create a toon to represent them as an introduction in the library somewhere! The opportunities are endless!! Think outside the cell!
