Make an Educational Cartoon in Any Language!

It’s no secret that there’s a shortage of educational materials in the languages of many of the countries we work in. This becomes doubly difficult when we’re teaching students whose native language uses non-Roman script, which can even make creating materials more difficult.

Well, we’ve got at least one small solution. Reading cartoons and graphic novels has been shown to improve overall literacy, and cartoons are a perennial favorite for relaying simple information to students quickly. It’s also a great way to get students writing, as interacting with images and texts can make the experience more engaging.

We’ve found three free solutions for teachers working in tough places, and two of them allow non-Roman script languages! We’ve tested Khmer and Pinyin, and both work great, hopefully it’ll work for any language you happen to work in. For all of them we recommend choosing “print” when you’re finished, and then printing (saving) to pdf on your computer. We’d love to see what you make, and even collect a database of international educational comics on Teachbuzz! Send your creations to contact@teachbuzz.org !

We’d love to show you some examples in these exciting languages, but our writing skills just aren’t that good yet… so, today’s examples will be in English.  (Click the titles to go to the sites and make your own cartoons.)

Funny Times

Great interface, several characters and images to choose from, and works for non-roman scripts. The only hitch is the printing tends to come out blurry. When saving to pdf, you should get an option to choose the scale percent. The one below uses 25% (it still comes out the same size, but 100% is very blurry). For your final product you may want to go as low as 10%. There doesn’t seem to be any drawback or change to choosing a smaller scale, other than the sharper resolution.

 

Read Write Think

This one worked for us in both Khmer and Pinyin, and we assume anything else, but has limited images to choose from, limited editing options, and the interface can be a bit frustrating.

Make Beliefs Comix

Available in English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian. It has some more options for characters, objects, and backgrounds, but it seems like it may cut off the final border in “printing.”

Creative Commons Love: twocentsworth on Flickr.com

Written by Michael Jones