Free cartoon maker for the classroom, no accounts
Jabbertoon lets students make talking cartoons in a web browser: they choose or build characters, type the lines, hear them spoken by voices made on their own device, pick how the characters move, and download the result as a video. This page has what you need to use it with a class. Below are the two characters every new cartoon starts with, playing two of the moves students can pick.
No account and no sign-up. Nobody is asked for a name, an email address, an age or a password.
Nothing you make is uploaded. Your characters, moves, lines and recordings stay in the browser on your device.
What students need
It runs in your web browser. There is nothing to install.
It is built for Chrome and Edge 100 or later, Safari 15.4 or later and Firefox 100 or later.
We have not yet checked Jabbertoon by hand on every kind of school device, so we do not list devices here until we have. If something does not work on yours, please tell us at the address at the bottom of this page.
What IT needs to allow
The studio and the block editor load some free, open code from cdn.jsdelivr.net, and the voices load a voice model from huggingface.co, which sends its large files from Hugging Face's download servers under hf.co. The other pages load nothing from anywhere but jabbertoon.com.
So a web filter needs to allow four domains: jabbertoon.com, cdn.jsdelivr.net, huggingface.co and hf.co. Allow hf.co with every name under it: huggingface.co sends the voice model's large files from Hugging Face's download servers there (such as us.aws.cdn.hf.co), and without it the voices will not load. The full list of hosts, and why each one is contacted, is on the privacy page.
The voice model and your Wi-Fi
The voice model is about 92 MB. It downloads once per device, the first time you make voices, and is kept by the browser after that. A guest session on a Chromebook downloads it again each time.
If 30 devices download it at the same moment, that is close to 3 GB over the school Wi-Fi. On the first day it helps to have students make voices a few at a time, or to load the voices on the devices before the lesson. Students who record their own voice, or who use captions with no sound, do not need the model at all.
Saving between lessons
Work is kept in the browser on the device it was made on. To carry a cartoon to the next lesson, or to another device, students should save it to a file and open that file next time; a move made in the block editor can also be kept as a link. On shared devices, saving to a file is the safe habit, because browser storage may be cleared.
Handing in work
Your cartoon downloads as a video file: MP4 where your browser can record MP4, otherwise WebM.
Students upload that video file to Google Classroom, Seesaw or your usual tool, the same way they hand in any other file. The video is made on the device while the cartoon plays, so the tab must stay open and visible until it is done.
Which courses it fits
- Middle-school and early high-school animation and storytelling units (grades 6 to 10): character design, writing a short script, voicing it and putting it on screen in a lesson or two.
- Texas CTE Animation I (TEKS §127.161), whose expectations include "script writing, character design, storyboarding, and audio and delivery formats" and "flip books, claymation, or cut-outs": Jabbertoon's characters are cut-outs on bones, and a cartoon is a script with voices and sound. (Texas Administrative Code, Chapter 127, Subchapter E)
- The principles of animation, which Texas Video Game Design (§127.171) also asks students to "demonstrate an understanding of and apply": our 12 principles guide shows them with real moves students can change.
- Computer science units that start with blocks: every move is a block program that is also readable as text, so students see the same program both ways.
A 45-minute lesson: a two-line cartoon
- Warm-up (5 minutes). Show the home page demo and ask: what makes the two characters look alive? (They breathe, blink, wag and wave.)
- Plan (5 minutes). In pairs, students write two lines of dialogue for two characters: one asks a question, the other answers in a surprising way.
- Build (15 minutes). In the studio, students pick or change the two characters, type the two lines, choose who says each, and pick a move for each line (Talk is a safe first choice). They press Play and adjust.
- Voices and moves (10 minutes). They make the voices, try a different move for the answer, and choose a look for the whole cartoon. Fast finishers open a move in the block editor and change one number.
- Share (10 minutes). Pairs download the video and hand it in, or play it for the class. Close with one question: which move made your character's feeling clearest, and why?
The first-cartoon guide walks through the studio step by step, and the talking-cartoon guide covers voices in more detail.
Privacy, in one page
The one-page privacy summary is written to be printed for parents, a school board or your IT team, and the privacy page has every detail.
Share it with your class
Share Jabbertoon to Google Classroom
The button opens Google Classroom's own share page with a link to the studio; you choose the class there. We do not see or store anything about your class.
Questions, problems or ideas for lessons: hello@jabbertoon.com.