OK so I’m normally pretty sceptical about the claims made by companies about how brilliant their new software is but……PowToon really is absolutely awesome. This is a relatively new animation package which allows users to create a combination of a standard presentation and a cartoon. It’s actually surprisingly different to other forms of visual presentation software like Prezi and VideoScribe. Prezi’s USP is the zoomable feature and whole range of easy to import templates. VideoScribe is brilliant if you love trying to guess what the pen or hand drawn picture is going to be. For me PowToon is just fantastic for the enormous range and quality of the animation available. Like Prezi, it’s totally free and like VideoScribe it’s entirely intuitive and unbelievably easy to grasp. Just to prove this I made the one minute PowToon below two hours after I first opened my free account on Wednesday night AND (this is very unlike me) I didn’t even watch the tutorials….

I admit that I did use part of a PowToon template to make this one but creating this was so quick that I grabbed a bit of spare time yesterday to see what I could do on my own. I loved the animated characters so I stuck to this theme for an American Government module summary. Having played around a bit with whole animated families, transitions, the use of props, flipping images and backgrounds I made this 50 second PowToon in about two hours and I had an enormous amount of fun along the way!

I admit that this is really cartoon focused but PowToon is perfectly capably of making much more ‘grown-up’ presentations using much more ‘business like’ animations. The range of characters, backgrounds and transitions is huge so the range of styles the user can adopt is massive and this makes PowToon a real winner for me. But that’s just me!!! I haven’t been an actual undergraduate for a long time now so I really wanted to find out what my students would think. It’s how to get their attention that interests me. So I’ve e-mailed all my personal tutees with three very different types of one minute module summary to see which they like best and why. On offer were:

1. My PowTooned American Government summary:

2. My VideoScribed British Government summary:

3. My Prezied Work Experience Year summary:

I’m just starting to receive replies so I’ll update the blog as soon as we have a winner! In the meantime I’m back to PowToon to see what else I can muster up over the weekend!