PowToon

Besides Animoto, I had the opportunity to create with PowToon this week. I made a movie for my freshmen to use to study this week's vocabulary words. There are really a lot of possibilities for PowToon in the classroom. Students could use to create their own illustrations for vocabulary, animated book trailers, or even to publish and animate their own written work. I also really like the idea of students narrating or recording over their creations. I can see using PowToon for research projects as well, where students will create informational presentations and will be forced to apply themselves as they could be asked to read and record the information they collect and include that in the project. PowToon is a great alternative to PowerPoint presentations and could either replace or supplement student writing for many assignments in the classroom.

To create with PowToon, you must sign up for an account, but it is free. It also syncs with Google, so I was able to simply click the Google button in order to create my account. I would advise students to do the same as our school accounts are through gmail and it is the most simple way to go about logging in. Upon logging in, PowToon walked me through a quick and easy tutorial for how to navigate the different tools in the software, which was very helpful.

I think this particular multimedia tool is appropriate for the high schoolers that I teach. It may be a little complicated for students in younger grades, but I have learned not to underestimate students and technology in the classroom. So, as an educator, I think it is whatever you are comfortable with using in your classroom.

After I added all the content I wanted into my presentation, I went in and added an audio file from PowToon and it worked out great since I was not needing specific timing for this particular project. However, a suggestion I would make to future users is to decide on an audio file beforehand so that it is simple to match slides as they are created. This is especially true if the the user is wanting to record his or her own audio.

 Happy creating!