During the summer, several of my favorite bloggers, including Richard Byrne at Free Tech 4 Teachers and Kelly Tenkely at iLearn Technology, posted about a new tool that is in Beta right now, called PowToon. If you have advanced from Powerpoint to Prezi, and are looking for a new presentation tool, PowToon might be your new choice. You will need to give them your e-mail address in order to get an invitation, but you should receive your login info fairly quickly; mine was in less than an hour. The basic level is free, granting you 20 uploads per month to YouTube.
Because PowToon is in Beta, there are a lot of features that are promised for the future. One problem that will hopefully be fixed fairly soon is the method for inserting images. You cannot insert directly from your computer files; you must give a URL on which the image is hosted. This is not insurmountable, but causes a few extra steps that are a bit monotonous.
I will direct you to Richard’s and Kelly’s posts for more details on PowToon. Kelly’s post is quite detailed, and she recommends watching PowToon’s How to Create Series – which I also highly suggest – once you get logged in.
Below is one of my PowToons, created about Universal Design for Learning. The video can also be found here: http://youtu.be/MvBCUURom0o
