Community reviews for PowToon

I enjoy the student Powtoon projects. Students appreciate the departure from standard/typical assignments for conveying understanding or demonstrating competency (or digital storytelling). Plus the additional requirements for critical thinking and sequencing (logic) and working with the timing of events requires higher level thinking skills and helps to reinforce those. Furthermore, I believe Powtoon is one of those applications that will help students develop a stronger base for learning other (possibly currently undeveloped) applications in the future.

Powtoons is very user friendly, it is a mix of animation, voice and sound. It is free and you can record your own voice for background in your presentation. Powtoon has a library that offers many characters and prompts that can be easily drag and drop into your presentation, it has a timeline that allows you to synchronize when your characters, graphics and voice come up in the presentation. It also has many pre-design templates that you can use and tweak as you may see fit to fulfill the purpose or the main goal of your presentation. If you would like to use it just to create a few animated presentation it is free, but if you would like to use in at school with your students there are several prices depending on what you needs are. It is great if you are planning to flip your classroom, it will grab students attention due to its great and comic animations. There is a blog that provides models/presentations of how to use Powtoon with different topics. The interface is very intuitive, you can start a presentation from scratch or you can use an already created Powtoon presentation and just tweak it. You can also import your own images or backgrounds as well as record your own voice. Transitions, timing and animations is very easy to do.

I think it is a great tool for students to present the information they have gathered through research in a fun and engaging way. Students find the site easy to use, but feel a lot of pride in the videos they make. With the free account you do have an annoying jingle playing at the end of your video, but apart from that, it is wonderful.

My overall opinion of PowToon is that it can be a lot of fun to build an animated presentation with this program. The program offers many pre-loaded text, image and icon offerings for users to peruse, as well as some narration and recording options. PowToon can be used by both beginners and more advanced users to create diverse and engaging presentations, plays or more. What I liked about PowToon was that it was fun and entertaining to learn to use the program. Creating a small animated film or presentation would be a very fun activity for many age groups, and learning the complexities of the program would be beneficial for students to learn. What I didn't like about PowToon is that a first time user will be overwhelmed with the amount of options and abilities of the program. A 5 minute completed PowToon took me over a few hours to complete the first time I used PowToon. Younger or newer users will need an extended amount of time to learn what the program can do, and how to get everything to work together in the way they want. I honestly would not use PowToon for the recommended age group of elementary school users unless they were given multiple hours of time to finish a small 3-5 minute PowToon. At that time limit- they might learn more from another lesson or activity than from learning PowToon. Middle Schoolers and High Schoolers would do much better with this program.

I have enjoyed working with PowToon and will continue to use it. My students find it very entertaining and are interested in watching the videos. The free template library and tools are limited, so multiple presentations may become tiresome if they all look the same. The paid version unlocks more options. There is the option to add a variety of media and the Clip-a-Vid feature allows you to trim videos so you get to the exact part you need. As other reviewers have stated, PowToon was developed as a business tool, and the education market feels like an afterthought. Nonetheless, I find it adaptive and very workable for my needs.

I like PowToon as a way to keep students engaged during the work time period of a lesson. The students enjoy creating them and sharing them with their classmates. Integrating with Google Apps for Education also makes it very easy for the students to work within our everyday classroom environment. Some parts of PowToon though are not student friendly and it can be hard to figure out how to do everything you want to do within the program.

Students were excited about the professional appeal of their finished product.

My overall opinion is that Powtoons is a wonderful tool for teaching second graders to enjoy writing and enhance their writing skills. The once familiar dread of writing a story no longer exists. This experience has taught my students that writing can be fun and engaging, while allowing more opportunities to be creative. Powtoons has allowed my students to see the big picture and the necessary steps that are required to achieve the final goal. I would highly recommend this process to other educators, because it has provided my students with a newfound passion to write and become better writers. Providing digital tools, such as Powtoons, provides students with a more motivating and engaging alternative to learn and grow in this digital age.

I love the animations. The students find them very engaging and got excited about the idea of creating one of their own. It makes for a great motivational teaching tool. Students will really want to learn their topic well enough to engage in the creation of a final project using this tool. It is easy to use and makes for very professional looking presentations.

I like using PowToon as a presentation tool. The animation and ease of use make it a fun and engaging tool for the classroom. Powtoon provides awesome resources for help and assistance. Students can easily submit links to teachers. I would love to see a collaborative option added to this tool.