Animate Your Awesomeness with PowToon

By Kris Walsh

There are many ways for students to learn and demonstrate their learning. As illustrated by last week’s post that Jamie did about the SAMR model, we can leverage technology in many different ways. Students can do worksheets, take tests and answer questions online, and while this is an improvement in the way students demonstrate learning, it is still doing a more traditional task in a new way and would be considered an A or augmentation on the SAMR model.

One thing that I have enjoyed seeing and being a part of this year has been the increasing amount of project based learning where students are demonstrating their learning in new ways. I have seen many cool videos and other projects this year. The technology that we have at hand provides many opportunities for students to create and demonstrate learning in new ways. The focus of this week’s post is a new tool for creating presentations called PowToon.

Many teachers are familiar with presentation software like PowerPoint, Prezi or even Thinglink. PowToon is a new fun and free web-based tool that students can use to create presentations. This tool is more complicated in that it has more options than some of the other presentation tools, but the products that can be created can be very creative and fun with a “cartoony” feel. 

Click the video to learn more

 

First, you will have to go to www.powtoon.com to create an account. Students need to be over 13 to create their own account. If you have students younger than that, you will have to let them have access to an account that you create for them. Students older than 13 should create their own account to make it easier for them to keep track of their own work and progress.

You can then choose to create using a template that students can use to make some minor tweaks, or start from scratch. From there, PowToon functions similarly to other presentation software, the difference is that it has many more animation tools that can be used to make the presentation come to life. All of the options seem daunting at first, but the tools and functions are pretty intuitive as you get into them.

What you cannot see in a static screenshot, all of the characters are animated, or can be. And the text is as well. You have tools on either side of the main window, and a timeline at the bottom of the screen that you can use to set the timing of when animations occur and how long they last. The presentations are saved on your PowToon account, but can be easily downloaded or sent to youtube as a video.

 This post is just an introduction to this webtool. If you look into this and want to learn more about it, please contact one of the eLearning coaches, we would be glad to assist you in learning more.