From time to time it is nice to look at new products that can help us in our work. For faculty and students a big part of our academic work involves creating interesting presentations to share our ideas. This article will provide a brief review of a presentation creation service called PowToons that you may find helpful in that regard.
PowToons permits presenters to break away from traditional PowerPoint-style presentations by creating fun and compelling cartoon-based animations that can be shared as slide shows or movies. The product can be purchased on a subscription or monthly basis. Although some may find PowToon pricey the potential to make your presentations unique may just be worth your financial investment. You can learn more about price structure for PowToon at there pricing page.
Screen shot of opening slide from my LCTAC Meeting demo production using PowToon.com
Fielding does not have a license for PowToon but I used the free feature and created a short announcement video for an upcoming meeting I am managing. This was a great way to put PowToon through its paces and see how it actually worked. Free PowToon content is editable but is only viewable from the PowToons site. Additionally PowToon attaches branding to the free product. See the quick announcement video.
Creating a PowToon animated video was actually pretty easy. Once you log in and establish a PowToon account you get access to a number of free templates that you can use…which is what I did to create this announcement. PowToon uses a browser-based editing environment with many options for font, color, graphics and animation styles. It is fun to go in and play with the different features. PowToon also provides a tutorial page with instructional videos for when you need help.
It took me about 20-30 minutes to edit down a 6 slide animation to the three I chose to use. I simply added my text, swapped out some illustration elements, did a little retiming of the animation features and published the results. For a premium fee users of PowToons can submit their finished video to YouTube, download a MP4 video version, or embed the HTML code is a web page.
From an instructional perspective I see the value of PowToon as closely related to telling stories about subject matter that may be difficult to communicate via text-based presentation alone. So, you really need to think about how might you use this well. Have a plan prior to using it.
But, by all means take a look at PowToon. It is one of several products available that take presentation beyond what we normally see. This type of product can help your next presentation be a bit more visually compelling and so engaging for its intended audience.
You can learn more about this product by visiting PowToon.
Craig Rademacher
Editor: ACCENT
atfielding.wordpress.com 