September 26, 2014 - Doing a Bang-Up Job With PowToon

Hello Everyone and Happy Friday!

Over the summer, I was introduced to a new free, online website which allows you to create personalized, professional looking, animated videos.  They are fairly simple to prepare and the results are a far more entertaining and engaging  - a great alternative to power point.

  

After signing up for a free account, PowToon (http://www.powtoon.com/)

allows you to create your own animated videos or simply choose to edit one of their pre-made presentations to suit your own needs.  They have many topics and designs to offer, covering topics such as book reports, television ads, promotional videos info-graphics and many more.  Alternately, you can begin from scratch and create your own individualized presentation by choosing your own style of background, characters, animations and text, complete with moving effects and transitions.  Creating the presentations is similar to making a power point presentation with the added effects of iMovie or Windows Movie Maker.  While PowToon may take a little time and effort to create initially, once the basic functions are understood, the presentations are created much more quickly and easily. 

I believe that this tool would be a wonderful link to media studies curriculum in the junior and intermediate grades – creating media texts, in addition to identifying conventions and techniques in media forms.  With little instruction, students would be able to explore and investigate the tools and animations available on the PowToon website and utilize them to construct their own striking videos and cartoons.

I hope that you enjoy this new tool, and if anyone has any feedback regarding its use with students or would like to share some student made assignments, I would love to see them.  Additionally, past Tech Tidbits posts can be found on my blog at http://techtidbitz.blogspot.ca.

Cheers and have a great weekend,

Stace