Pow a Toon

Today was my last day with my kiddio's, tomorrow we still have school but are doing 'special' end of the year celebrations, I won't even get into the idiocy of all that this post, so we will be with a grade level and not our specific classes. 

It was bittersweet: I am so beyond ready for a break but this semester was my best/favorite group of students yet. In nearly all of my classes we rarely had behavioral issues, they all seemed mildly interested most days and most everyone got along. Considering where I started four semesters ago this is a MAJOR improvement. 

So I officially say I WON THIS SEMESTER. 

A few weeks ago a student interested me to something called PowToon. 

PowToon is an online software that allows you to make presentations that look movie-ish, for free. Basically powerpoint on steroids. And I was hooked.

We were just starting the final project in my Career Tech class so I showed them PowToon but gave them the option to use whatever software they wanted to. I suspected that the majority of the class would use powerpoint because it is a very BIG crutch for my kiddios...I once caught a guy taking notes in powerpoint because he didn't know where else to go.

We were on a pretty tight time crunch with exactly two weeks (8 days to complete the research and presentation) so I had no intention of spending any class time teaching my students to use PowToon.

Surprisingly enough 90% of my students chose PowToon and basically taught themselves how to create a presentation outside of powerpoint. These are the same kiddios that 16 weeks prior had difficulty attaching files to emails or saving pictures on their drives. I was completely over the moon at some of the presentations.

Pros:  

• Looks very similar to powerpoint. 
• Animation is much easier to make work than powerpoint.
• Recording your own voice into the presentation also incredible easy.
• Free to use.
• Can be accessed on any computer that has the internet.

Cons:

• You need an email address to log in.
• You also have to set up a password, that password needs to be remembered.
• You must save constantly, if the internet goes down and you only save when I tell you to log out you are screwed.
• All of the animations can be overwhelming for kids...they pull their attention away from content.
• The concept that text boxes fly in and then disappear was difficult for some of my kiddo's to grasp.

And that is enough talking out of me, here are a few examples of the awesomeness that is PowToon.

PowToon's versatility means it could be used for so many different types of presentations, in my web design class students made commercials for their companies as a little bonus to their websites. 

What could your students do with PowToon?

- The Babbling Box!