Videos: Powtoon and Mysimpleshow

Videos can be a very engaging and effective for teaching, we can pause them, watch them as many times as we want or even change the speed.

Powtoon

As teachers we can create videos about the topic or concept we want to explain to our students. With powtoon we can make very attractive videos as we did in this case to explain the main concepts about energy.

I believe that powtoon is useful if you want to create basic and simple videos. However, it has a lot of features locked only for the premium version and it makes it limited if you want to be creative or make videos longer that 3 minutes.

I personally think that videos are great to introduce students to a topic as it is very visual and dynamic. However, we have to be careful in how much information we want to include in the video or how long or short it will be. If we add a lot of information in a short video they may get overwhelmed and they may not remember anything they just saw. On the other hand, if it is too long they may pay attention at the beginning, but after 5 minutes they will probably start to lose interest. That is why a good valance of time and content is essential.

The language we use will also be very important. If we use video to introduce new ideas, we will use vocabulary that they may not know, that is why it is important to use an appropriate language according to their level and try to be clear. 

Many teachers look for YouTube videos already created by other people and in the case of  American or British authors they probably use an advanced language for students whose mother tongue is not English. Therefore, creating our own videos with tools such as Powtoon is very useful since we choose the content and language level.

However, it is true that making videos is very time-consuming and that not all teachers may have the time to use videos as a recurrent resource. 

Mysimpleshow

Videos are not only useful for teachers but also for students. They can create their own videos and put their knowledge into practice. 

With myslimpleshow you can write a text about anything you want and the tool converts the text into a dynamic video. In this case, I made a video of an example of an hypothetic task a teacher could propose in order to practice the past simple. Students would have to make a short text answering the question "What did you do yesterday?" and then use Mysimpleshow to make a video about it. Here it is the example.

Even if you have to pay in order to unlock all the features I believe the free version is enough to work with students.

I think it is a very attractive and different way of working with students and make them more engaged and motivated.