Digital Tools: What should I use?
There are so many forms of digital/ technological media worth investing in when presenting and planning learning experiences for our students. Using pictures, audio, videos, infographics and other forms of digital media is fantastic, although what are you going to present this in? Should you use PowerPoint like everyone else? what about Tik Tok?
Well..... I wouldn't suggest ever downloading Tik Tok as a channel of communication but our future adults and current learners are, and I'm sure you have all seen or heard of students talking, creating and updating their own Tik Tok accounts. The infographic below shows how impact-full Tik Tok has been.
This application, so readily downloaded is an integrative software allowing students and others to present video, audio, pictures and informative text through an intuitive and creative way, globally. This social media platform is designed for users to create, share, interact and discover short music videos, think karaoke but for the digital age. This platform allows an outlet to express yourself through singing, dancing, lip-syncing, comedy and all forms of quirky creativity. It is immensely successful in captivating school aged children, but just how successful?
As a beginner teacher, this information is astounding. Knowing that a presentation platform can be that impact-full and successful makes me wonder why we don't use it or other software with unique characteristics in the classroom? If students take so much joy at home and in public creating, augmenting and sharing their created presentations through Tik Tok, why don't they enjoy doing this in the classroom?
Now we know there are many ways of learning, and with that, many different learning styles. Specific to the classroom climate, engaging all learners may require providing experiences that are visual, auditory and or kinaesthetic.
Media can fully support student immersion and captivate, motivate and engage all styles of learners, this is made evident with Tik Tok, YouTube, Facebook and other media outlets. This sort of resource can promote complex content and ideas in a compressed period of time. To be successful I think we as educators need to get creative.
POWTOON
Powtoon is a free web-based animation software that allows easy and creative creations of information and other digital media in a presentation style format. Students can use this to manipulate pre-created presentations, import images, import music or voice overs and import other video format to create their own original presentations. Most common software like this would be PowerPoint and
Prezi. All these platforms have unique characteristics and purposes, althoguh creativity is the key to tweaking them for educational purposes. Like Tik Tok, these powerful multimedia tools for students can be used to enhance their engagement, motivation, learning and ICT capabilities. The image below is the home page of Powtoon. This highlights the intuitive design, catering for individualized experiences that caters for all learning capacities.
This type of media allows students to be creative and the opportunity to express themselves through a medium that is easily accessible, very customizable and intuitive, being very adaptive to the vast diversity within a classroom. This technology is transferable to higher education and adulthood, allowing learners to augment images, text, colour and audio. These presentations are always then available in the "My Powtoon" section. The added benefit of this technology is being able to export created presentations to YouTube, Facebook, PowerPoint and can also be published as a PDF. An example of what a presentation created with Powtoon looks like:
So What Makes POWTOON so Good?
In a short amount of time, I created my own captivating and engaging presentation. The benefit is it's extreme similarities to PowerPoint, meaning students need almost no training or instructions on how to use it. It is intuitive and allows a very simplistic way of presenting a slideshow in movie format.
Click this link to see my created Powtoon presentation.
However the powerful part of this platform is incorporating student access and use. Allowing students to access and create presentations for HPE and Science tasks would enhance their experiences and interactions with subject content. Providing different and exciting ways to manipulate information and collaborating with other created templates/ presentations will give students ideas, inspiration and motivation to engage with their creations, providing enhanced learning opportunities.
SAMR MODEL and POWTOON
Substitution Level: Students present their answers to a quiz or research task in Powtoon.
Augmentation Level: Students create augmented videos/ presentation on caffeine, and the effects on the human body.
Modification Level: Students fully utilize Powtoon, implementing caffeine information, embedding images, texts, videos and audio as required to create a informative presentation to show their peers.
Redefinition Level: Students develop their caffeine presentation and export to slide share for peer and global feedback and collaboration.
Implications
All things considered, the negative is it isn't collaborative and presentations can only have one author. The presentations created though could be embedded within blogs and wiki's to still create collaborative spaces with augmented, informative presentation like videos or slideshows. This technology is safe and student friendly. Implications with image, audio and video Copyright would need to be discussed with students prior to using this platform to ensure further referencing and appropriate recognition of resources is done.
References
