This week, I opted for a bit of the unknown, asking for permission to use a program I stumbled upon while exploring media for another project. The name of the program is PowToon, and the presentation I found was actually a promo for the program. Since Scalar doesn't seem to want to allow me to embed a YouTube video, here's the link: http://youtu.be/eLGLtnRopJM.

The program has a remarkably easy learning curve. An account is free, although there is the option to pay for "Premium" and receive access to all sorts of cool bells and whistles. But, I can imagine plenty of creative options just using the basic components. This is a presentation program, and lauds itself as a replacement to both PowerPoint AND Prezi. After watching the introduction video, I headed over to create my first PowToon.

This is essentially an animation-based program, complete with some basic options for adding music. There is also an option for voiceovers, although this was into the "pay as you go" column. There is a rather wide selection of templates to choose from, categorized in a fairly broad range. To add images, the program takes the user to a creative commons site -- Flickr -- if the included image selections aren't enough. The command structure is fairly intuitive, especially if you've ever created a multimedia presentation (which I had not). Unlike my experience with Glogster, which really needed a cheat sheet for the commands, this program offers hover tags (not the technical terms, but I'm a newbie, so that will do). The interface uses the fairly familiar "add text box" or "add image" commands, and some of the images available are already animated to some degree.

I must admit, this was a fun program to use, and I can imagine all sorts of uses for the college writing classroom (literacy narratives, presentations, instructional presentations). The overall "feel" of the program is not the most "academic" or "professional" so I imagine the uses might be limited to those rhetorical situations that allow a bit of a light-hearted tone, although I imagine a user could select some of the more basic shapes and functions to fit into the more rhetorically serious scenarios. I did have a bit of trouble getting the synchronization of images where I wanted, but that is probably more my inexperience with creating this type of movie-reel type of animated media. However, once again the controls lent themselves to a fairly easy learning curve.

My primary concern with this choice is that I felt at times the design elements and the entire presentation model forces the user to "think small"; that is, this is no program to overload with images and text. Of course, since it's promoted as an alternative to PowerPoint and Prezi, which can quickly become text-dense, perhaps this is the idea. However, after I finished the presentation, I am concerned that the type of summary facilitated by this program may have left out some of the more interesting examples Medina offers in this chapter. Yet, since this was also a fairly straightforward chapter, the key points (summarized at the end) do match up rather well, I think. The program offers a few (3, in fact) options for publishing the finished product, but the YouTube option is the one I chose. So for those who already have a YouTube account, publishing is a quick and easy step.


Here is the link to the finished product: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9myTIMIpFM&rel=0

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This week I reviewed Kim's review of NL3, using Google Presentation, and Kelly's use of MindMeister to review Brain Rules Ch. 3.

After reviewing Kelly's mind map, I thought (and commented) that the mind map programs really suit the way Brain Rules is laid out as a text. Medina's prose is concise and tightly organized, making it easier for me to pull out key concepts, then reproduce them in such a hierarchical structure as MindMeister seems to permit. As a previous post suggested, MindMeister's hierarchical structure forces upon the user a limited number of options in terms of organizing concepts, which may not work as well for folks to see texts in  3-D or as a complex network of connections. But for Brain Rules, it works! Also, as I was reviewing her summary of NL3, I was reminded of Ken Robinson's presentation on educational paradigms and the manufacturing model which used another digital presentation technology that I'd love to try: http://youtu.be/zDZFcDGpL4U.

Kim's Google Presentation is a richly detailed overview of this chapter, and I plan to refer to it often! It seems like this program allows visualization of key concepts without relying too heavily on text. I really appreciate the use of the concept wheels and the word clouds -- I imagine this type of visual summary would be very useful when encouraging students working with source texts in research! Seeing this amount of detail also made me think that I'm "missing out" by not reading the chapter myself in this rotation, but the visuals combined with key text excerpts (and Pink Floyd's classic tune -- which was stuck in my head for hours after reviewing the slide!) seem to me to capture the essence of the chapter.

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