Powtoon
Post date: Oct 8, 2013 7:21:34 PM
I've tossed around the idea of making short little 1 minute "previously on..." videos to go along with my lecture notes. I had these grand plans of doing them as a SportsCenter style countdown complete with highlights and commentary.
That never happened.
The amount of time it would have taken to do that for all my presentations would have been astronomical. Plus, at the rate my presentations change, I'd have to redo them all in a couple years. No thanks. Recently though I found Powtoon and my dream was realized. Powtoon is a web-based presentation tool that outputs as a video. It doesn't do anything Powerpoint couldn't do but it is quick, simple and all integrated into a nice little package. The finished videos look fantastic and are relatively simple to do. The most time-consuming part is uploading graphics without backgrounds which is completely optional anyway. It is almost easy enough to have students use it themselves.
Almost.
There is definitely a learning curve to the program. With instruction you could have kids making pretty good ones within an hour I imagine.
Even without that though I am very happy to have found it and highly recommend checking it out at www.powtoon.com. Here's a sample.