Here’s a good example of a water-cycle lesson: I could see a teacher giving an online lesson using images and animations to help explain, and even a virtual cartoon instructor. Videos could be created to teach mini-lessons, to spur thought and discussion, and would be great ways to liven up a blended classroom, flipped classroom, or online teaching. Maybe I can use this video as a refresher of my rules or for new students who arrive after the first day of class. I made it kind of general so that I could use it for any class any term, and I wanted it to be good before my 2-day trial ended! Also, no matter what I did, it would not play the music I selected for the video, so I had to use some free music from YouTube. Even though I used a template, it took me about 4 hours to make this 2-minute video. Let’s take a quick look at all the animation programs at a glance: ProgramįREE with limited choices, no export, videos up to 5 mins.įREE with limited choices, micro-transactions, video up to 10 mins.įREE with limited choices, micro-transactions, $99 / year for 1 teacher, 30 students įREE videos up to 2 mins, 5 exports a monthġ4-day FREE full feature trial, voice and text to speech available through subscriptionīelow is a first day video that I made using PowToons.

Only a few are truly free to use products.

They have free trials, but they don’t last forever. Overall, even for me, most of the animation programs are very time consuming, even when using templates, so the most important thing to think about is “is this worth the time I’m putting in?” Can the video you put time in making be used for more than one class? The next thing to think about is, is it worth the price? Most of these have pricing options. All of my worries were correct, but nonetheless I did find some benefits and useful ideas. Even though I consider myself tech savvy, I was a bit leery about the time it would take to create animated videos for class, why making a video would be better than giving a lesson in person, and the cost. I recently attended an IEP mini-conference at Georgia Tech and attended a session about using animations given by Sangha Lee from Georgia State University.

Plotagon education free trial