What is PowToon?
As an Instructional Designer, I am often approached by faculty for recommendations on presentation software, as they seek to add animated or interactive elements to their courses. As such, I chose to evaluate PowToon for this assignment. Although PowToon was not available when I was teaching K-12, I had heard about it at several major social studies and design conferences and decided it was time to see what the buzz was about.
PowToon presents itself as a web-based program to “create engaging, animated videos with a professional look and feel” in about 20 minutes. Users have the options of creating a free account or opting for a subscription which, depending on the level, provides access to advanced features or services. A small variety of storyboard templates are provided for the free account; themes include: Professional, Whiteboard, Infographic, Cartoon, and Corporate. When building videos, images, audio, backgrounds, transitions, timing and animations can be added to the templates, modified from the existing item, or swapped for an alternative in their object library.
Here is the animated video I created using a template and modifying it to test PowToon’s features:
How can PowToon be used by Higher Ed Faculty and Students?
PowToon would allow faculty to create short animation videos for students, perhaps introducing themselves or presenting classroom procedures, their syllabus, or unit overviews. Faculty could also offer PowToon as a complementary option to presentations done in PowerPoint, Google Slides, iMovie, or Prezi. Students could use the animated videos created in PowToon to demonstrate mastery of content, replace outdated “newroom” activities wherein students act out a new show or create commercials to share content, or create presentations that required them to act as the expert, including reports, personal stories, summarizing content knowledge, etc. In line with the course theme, PowToon could certainly be used to create differentiation in both the presentation of instructor content and student assignments.
That said, much of a student or faculty member’s ability to learn and effectively use PowToon will depend on technology know-how, and even then, there is a small learning curve. If one is familiar with the story board process and using templates with animations (such as in emaze), it takes several hours to pick up basic skills. Templates are provided to help reduce the initial time investment, in that users can begin by using or modifying already created slides until they are comfortable with the creation process. Once they are comfortable, they can begin to heavily change, modify, etc. the templates based on their need. Finally, blank pages are available for those who have mastered the technology. In this sense, the technology provides a practical “training wheels” experience. For someone who is not tech savvy or even tech comfortable, it would likely take much longer to learn to customize the templates than for someone who is a digital native. Regardless, for someone who is not daily involved in the process of storyboards or creating animated material, 20 minutes is a low estimate for the length of time required to create a personalized PowToon.
Would I Recommend Faculty Use PowToon or Share with Students?
Given the nature of PowToon, I would recommend it to more tech adventurous faculty as an alternative for providing instruction sets, introductions, or short content presentations to students; I would be hesitant to do so for faculty who struggle with basic technologies. The program, while somewhat intuitive, does require a bit of determination and time if you want to do more than just take a template and change the text it contains. As far as use with students, I would encourage faculty to provide it as an option, along with PowerPoint, emaze, VoiceThread, Google Slides, Prezi, iMovie, etc. when they are asked to create presentations or introductions. As with the other software mentioned, I would ensure students knew how to access the Support section and I would never require they learn the specific technology (where the option comes in) unless it were a graphic design program (which we are not).
Bottom line? PowToon has a lot of really neat features that enable faculty or students to do short, professional, animated presentations. The time to learn the software is a bit more than 20 minutes, so I would recommend it only to faculty or students who are already somewhat tech savvy or who I know do not become easily frustrated when attempting new technology.
For the K-12 Teachers Interested in Using PowToon with Students
As an interesting side note to those of you teaching K-12, users must be 18 years of age to create a free account; to obtain accounts for students you must use the PowToon Education instance. Here, students can individually join for $5 each per month or a classroom subscription can be created for $8 or $16 a month; each classroom account gives access to 1 teacher and 60 students. While not prohibitively expensive, this is certainly something to consider before you decide to adopt the technology for your students.
Here is my full review of PowToon.
