Powtoon is an animated video creation site. With Powtoon, you can create short animated video lessons to get students' attention and to engage them. It has ready made templates, or you can create a Powtoon from the ground up. You can sign up for free for limited access and capabilities. Additional capabilities are available with a subscription.
Powtoon is a different way to incorporate short engaging videos into your lesson to grab your students' attention. Even in the free version, you get 100 MB of storage space from Powtoon, you can use free royalty-free objects, free royalty-free music, and can create HD videos up to three minutes long. These videos are long enough to introduce a topic, focus the students on several important things you will cover in more depth in the lesson, present classroom rules, present short how-to lessons, or present an overview of your class syllabus.
If you subscribe as a teacher, you get 10 GB of storage, unlimited access to royalty-free objects, unlimited access to royalty-free music, can create HD videos up to twenty minutes long, and maybe most important, you can download your videos as MP4 files. This would allow you to embed your videos in your LMS or share using platforms other than Powtoon.
After signing up for a free Powtoon account, the quickest way to get started is to use one of the over one hundred free templates Powtoon provides. You can sort by use and role. For example, sorting by education and then teacher, it reduces the templates to fourteen likely formats you will want to use.
After selecting your template, you will be able to play each slide to see what it does and make any changes or additions you want to make to objects or text. You go through each slide, making any changes or additions until you complete your video. In the free version, the timing of each slide is already set, but you can choose to edit this as well, so long at the total time for the video does not exceed three minutes.
You can share the videos made with the free version through a link to your Powtoon video on the Powtoon site, through Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia, or Hubspot. If you choose to pay for a teacher account, or if your administration will pay for your classroom, you will also be able to share your Powtoon video via Twitter, LinkedIn, email, or embedding the Powtoon on a site as well as being able to download the video you created as an MP4 file, which would allow you to upload it to an LMS to share with your students.
The Powtoon lessons can be assigned to watch outside of class in order to provide information needed for the next day's lesson, for an introduction to a topic, or as a review of information and concepts already taught. When the Powtoons lessons are completed outside of class, there is more time in class for discussions, one-on-one or small-group teaching, or hands-on activities like experiments in science class.
Some helpful videos to get you started implementing Powtoon in your lessons.
Some helpful links to get you started implementing Powtoon in your lessons.
Created By: C. Cox