Guess What! Students are not taking full advantage of technology and are actually hindering themselves from evolving as learners and more specifically content creators. The more surprising part comes from the fact that teachers may be actually encouraging this to happen, without even realizing it! In order for students to be using technology to its full potential as an aid to help them reach their full potential, they need to shy away from pre-constructed templates and move into programs that allow them to be active content generators. As teachers, we need to be sure we are fostering our students creativity and encouraging them to play an active role in their own creative processes.
Below is a Powtoon I have created reflecting on Ashley Hinck’s article published in Hybrid Pedagogy entitled “Digital Ghosts In The Modern Classroom“. I had a really fun time using Powtoon as a form of multimedia technology, until it told me that my video couldn’t be longer than 3 minutes long. In Powtoon’s public documentation it says that animations created on their free platform can be up to 5 minutes, however this was not the case. That is why I have attached two videos, a part 1 and a part 2. Aside from this minor bump in the road while using this program I found Powtoon easy to navigate and use. There are many different formats, fonts, colours and characters available for creative expression and importing music/voice recording was simple (as long as your file was in an mp3 format that is). Overall, I would recommend using Powtoon to anyone that is willing to put in time to create an animation essentially from scratch.
I hope you enjoy my two-part animation summarizing Hinck’s article and my thoughts and reflections on the content.
Keep being content creators everyone!
– Faith Hudvagner