Review of Powtoon The following is my review of Powtoon as an

Review of Powtoon

The following is my review of Powtoon as an instructional tool.

Below is an example of a short Powtoon that I created as an intro for summer

course.

https://www.powtoon.com/c/b8iISoFl0tp/1/m

The Good:

With the paid educational version:

• you can upload your own images up to 5MG

• you can now add a voiceover or use text to speech

• you can now add short recordings of yourself

The Bad:

• This platform has a steep learning curve. It looks intuitive on the

surface, but few things work the way you would expect them to.

• It now oers converting PowerPoint presentations into Powtoons. This

sounds like a good idea because then you would be able to use your PPT

presentation as a template and then just add the video animation

elements/music/video you want or need after it has been converted.

Unfortunately, I found that the converted PowerPoints are often missing

words or sections.

• It is a very time-consuming tool. As they have added more bells and

whistles to the platform, the number of steps required to create or edit a

single Powtoon has gone up exponentially. Creating a 3-5 minute video

can easily take an entire day. The amount of time needed can be

shortened by using one of their templates, but we will discuss this in the

next section.

The Ugly:

I had chosen Powtoon as an instructional technology tool based on my limited

experience with free version the previous year. Between the time that I had

used Powtoon and I received the funds to buy the educational license,

Powtoon had changed its business model and pricing structure. It had also

decided to no longer target educational users. Everything that was previously

oered in the educational license like educational support and specialized

templates was no longer available.

Their current pricing structure is the following:

If you search around, you can still ﬁnd the educational package, which is

billed at $96 annually.

Unfortunately, the educational content package is essentially no dierent

than the free content package.

What it currently oers:

Templates:

It currently oers 32 templates that they suggest for educational use by

teachers and faculty. There is no way to sort or ﬁlter content by what is

included in the educational license, only by “Pro” or not. Below are examples

of the templates included in those 32 suggestions:

As you can see, most are not useful to teachers or faculty. Not only that, to

access most of these, you would have to have a “Pro” license, and not an

“Edu” license.

When I spoke to customer support, they were unable to tell me where I could

ﬁnd educational package content and pointed me to the following four free

templates:

As demonstrated below, most characters and scenes are also “Pro” and

require an upgraded account.

Free props are now what you used to get in PPT in Windows 95.

Everything else requires you to upgrade. To top it all o, if you accidentally go

over the number of allotted slides/time for your type of license, it does not

alert you until after you have completed the entire Powtoon video and then

tells you that you have to upgrade your account to “Pro” to publish the

Powtoon as is or delete the slides that you created.

For all of the aforementioned reasons, I would not suggest that anyone pay for

the educational license for Powtoon as it is currently oered. Any beneﬁt that

you can get from using the tool can be found in the free version.