PowToon is a platform for students and teachers to create infographics, cartoon stories, presentations, and animated slide shows, but students might have difficulty managing the site independently. The free trial allows users to create low quality animations with limited music, fonts and a 5 minute animation time limit. The upgrade adds storage, improved resolution, and allows for presentations up to 60 minutes.The trial provides ten useful student templates with ready made slides for topics including resumes and book reports that use cute animations and fonts as well as four teacher templates including a syllabus and 8-step instructions. Students might opt to start with a template and then edit with their own text and visuals. For example, the first slide for the book report is : Hello, my name is (insert name). Unfortunately, it can be very challenging to add font and align on the slide which many users will find frustrating and needlessly time consuming. It is also difficult to navigate the site or move from screen to screen. Nonetheless, there are many attractive features including hundreds of replacement slides, voiceovers and music. There are also pop-up slides with helpful directions if a student is having difficulty. Overall, this site presents an attractive platform for teachers and students to make creative animated slideshows, but using the site proves to be quite difficult and may cause needless frustration.

• Provides sufficient and varied types of practice problems to maximize understanding and generalization of the targeted skill/concept
• Manufacturer claims alignment with Common Core/Known Standards
• Presents educational concepts accurately
• Explains answers so students can learn from mistakes
• Better for teaching the skill to new or struggling learners
• Better for practicing or refreshing the skill
• Skills are practiced through authentic, meaningful problems (not just rote practice)

• Appropriate for a broad age range to use and enjoy
• Subject matter and problems are relevant, interesting and authentic to students
• Visually appealing to children in the target age range
• Provides virtual rewards or incentives after meeting specified goals or objectives
• Provides a "break activity" between academic problem sets
• Offers ongoing, progressive challenge
• Overall - Enjoyable. Given the option, students would choose this option

• Has a free or trial version
• Provides teaching guidance for adults to support the child and set appropriate goals
• Provides an age-appropriate tutorial/first time users can work independently
• Student should be able to use independently after first use
• Has a multi-player option to foster in-person collaboration or cooperation
• Multiple users can save a profile
• Student graduates to the next level or topic only after meeting a benchmark
• Can play without sound and not distract others
• Students can save work between sessions
• Can effectively understand and monitor student's progress (email report or in product)
• Requires registration before using the first time
• Provides options to play in languages other than English/Good for ELL
• Presents information in multiple formats (voice over, pictures and text, etc.)
• Overall - Easy to use

• Fine Motor Skills
• Requires challenging finger movements, motor precision or physical manipulation
• Organization
• Directions may be confusing for students using independently