This is a guest post by Çağla Usta, one of my students from Foreign Languages Education Department at METU... Çağla is a born teacher with great ideas, that's why I asked her to contribute to my blog and she kindly accepted... This is what she would like to share with us:
In recent years, visual presentation tools
have become quite popular and indispensible, especially in education. The most
popular one is undoubtedly Power Point Presentations. However, because of their
extensive and perfunctory usage, it is clear that PowerPoint presentations are
not able to appeal to people that much anymore.
Therefore, we need other alternative
presentation tools to grab our audience’s attention, especially for the younger
ones. Very recent and amazing one of these alternatives is provided by a
company named “Powtoon”. The company works through an internet site: www.powtoon.com. Here we can create free,
colorful and visually engaging presentations in just a few minutes. The
fantastic thing about it is the fact that Powtoon enables us to create animated
presentations as well, which certainly appeals to both kids and adults. Moreover,
Powtoon presentations are not common, thus still quite attractive for most of
the people.
After you sign up for free, you can start
to create your presentation either by using the ready-made templates or a blank
page. The free version of Powtoon includes 10 different themes. Each theme
contains various different backgrounds, icons, objects, songs, sounds,
transitions, and both animated and stable characters. In addition to these default
themes, it is also possible to upload and embed any image, video or sound,
including your own voice. Also, it enables the user to save the presentation
either as a slideshow or a video clip which can be also uploaded to your
Youtube channel.
Different from the free version, the paid version
of Powtoon also provides 11 more themes which involve far more appealing and
animated characters. Further, it allows users to download their presentations
to their computers unlike the free version. (A tip for free users: You
do not have to buy the full version of Powtoon just to be able to download your
presentation. After you upload your Powtoon presentation to your Youtube
channel, which is free, there are several easy methods to download a video from
Youtube to your computer; you can google it :) )
If you are used to preparing PowerPoint
presentations, it may seem a bit harder to use Powtoon at first. But actually
Powtoon is among the most user friendly softwares with clear instructions and a
plain format. You have everything you
need in a single page. After you learn the basics, the rest is up to your
creativity...
Here is the link to a Powtoon presentation I created for you:
Enjoy...