Hi, guys!
Have you ever been wondering what is Powtoon? Sounds like cartoon, neighbour of platoon or maybe cousin of spoon? What is Powtoon? Powtoon is actually a video maker software. And what's more is you can create a video to be used as teaching aid throughout a lesson. It was founded about 9 years back in 2011 by Ilya Spitalnik and Daniel Zaturansky under a British company. In February 2013, Powtoon started introducing a free account option allowing users to create animated videos that can be exported to their YouTube account and of course, the free videos include the Powtoon branding.
The latter logo is the newest Powtoon's logo.
Source: Google
Powtoon is a web-based animation software that allows users to create animated presentations by manipulating pre-created objects, imported images, provided music and user-created voice-overs.
A user who has no background as designer, we can choose to use existing template by incorporating it into the video within minutes. There are variety of templates exclusively dedicated for educational purposes.
I personally think that Powtoon is beneficial for educators to make teaching and learning more fun and engaging compared to lesson with boring slides. However, I believe that it requires effort too since educators need to remake slide presentations using Powtoon which they must cover a lot of things and topics. It can be an option and you might want to consider using Powtoon when teaching a dull topic with a lot of factual sentences. By using Powtoon, those who are visual learners could engage and adapt really well. Since Powtoon can be downloaded, perhaps the videos could be converted to MP3 format for the auditory learners. Other than creating the videos as teaching materials, instructors/educators may assign a project for students and then, present their awesome Powtoon video in class. This will take time but do assign them simple topics so that they could finish within a short period. It proves that a Powtoon video could be done within minutes since it is a friendly apps for its users.
Remember, Powtoon is one of the ways you can induce animation in education!
Happy reading and do create more educational animations!