Web Resource Review: Online Comic Making Tool FOR FOREIGN LANGUAGES

Make Beliefs Comix is a very simple comic making website. It lets you make two, three, or four panel comics using its library of characters, backgrounds, and props. The options are limited, rather like StoryBirds (and the other online publishing tools we've studied), but it supports several foreign languages (and their special characters), including Spanish, French, German, and Latin. You just type out the text that you want to insert in another window - and it does provide links to an online typing site called TypeIt where you can type with the special characters for a given language, another great resource - and then paste it into the window.

This website is simple enough that you could easily have students use it to make comics of their own to practice vocabulary or grammar concepts -- I made the one below in maybe fifteen minutes (I didn't time myself, and I was playing around with the tools as much as working). It even has a page of suggestions for using their website in your lesson plan, in case you want inspiration. To save a comic, students can print it or email it to themselves.


Make Beliefs Comix does have downsides, however.  As mentioned earlier, the options for characters, backgrounds, and props is limited, and there is not a way to upload your own work. For a comic that claims to support Latin, it has no Roman-themed items (and the link for typing in Latin leads to a generalized "Latin alphabet" site...as in the modern English alphabet plus special characters...not one with the actual macrons used in Classical Latin.)

Overall, this is a simple tool for making comics. Given its limitations, it can be very useful to teachers and students as a review and production tool. I can see it being handy in language classrooms, though perhaps moreso in modern language classes than Latin ones, considering the dearth of  Roman items.