Powtoon is a free online animated presentation tool with a host of features for bringing alive whatever message schools may wish to share with their school community or wider audiences. So whether promoting aspects of the life of a school, explaining processes or sharing learning and teaching activity of a class then Powtoon can provide an option to create engaging presentations. There is an inbuilt bank of graphics, all of which can have a variety of animations applied, and sequenced and re-sequenced to best illustrate any message. The free account lets users create and save a good number of different presentations and upload any completed presentations directly to YouTube (paid premium versions have the option to download completed presentations as videos). The free version accounts with Powtoon (with options for a free education-specific account) restrict the length of the finished presentations/videos and include the Powtoon message logo and watermark (which would not be included in the premium versions). In addition to the free to use graphics there is also the facility to add from a choice of free-to-use music tracks which will match the length of your completed presentation/video. And of course you can add voice narration to the presentation. Click here to watch a promotional video for Powtoon https://youtu.be/xg6jmQI0274

Click here to watch a presentation by a teacher using Powtoon to explain a task to pupils (Mrs Frank at Saint Agnes Academy-Saint Dominic School):

https://youtu.be/OaKV3GkOsMM

 

Sparkol Videoscribe – if you are looking for even more than Powtoon provides, then you may wish to have a look at Sparkol Videoscribe. This commercial product adds a number of features to those which Powtoon provides, one of which is that the animated drawing hand can show the building up of any image so the viewer of the finished presentation sees the chosen object being drawn in front of their eyes. Click here for an example video by Preston Lodge High School, East Lothian of the kind of presentation video which would be possible to create in this style: http://www.youtube.com/v/Q8VARI4k7kEGabriel Guzman has produced a video explaining Bloom's Taxonomy using VideoScribe
http://www.youtube.com/v/dwxmPrBdIcQ Wideo is a free online tool for creating animated videos with a range of inbuilt graphics and animations. There is a range of examples of uses in education provided by many users. There are inbuilt video tutorials showing the ease with which animated videos with voiceover can be created.

Examples of video presentations by schools

The video below is from Echt Primary School

http://youtu.be/UlCW3bsB1Vw