Have you ever wanted to create a sweet splainer video?  (I swear ‘splainer’ is a real word.  At least as long as appearing in urban dictionary counts.)  Do you admire the animated videos you see on websites and wish that you could make one for your course that will really bring a concept to life?  Luckily, if this is your heart’s desire, there are some tools that will do just that.  Sure you could use tools that are slick and cost money like Tumult Hype or Adobe Edge, but what about free tools?  Well, no kidding, there are some very easy and very FREE tools that can help you make your animated dreams come true.

Introducing Wideo, Moovly, and PowToon…

Cue logos…

These three online tools do very similar things.  They create animations using a simple editor.  They truly are quite easy to use.  Here’s the splainer (it’s a word, seriously) video for all three products:

And just to prove how easy they are to use, here are three more videos using the same image files in each of the three platforms.  All three are educational videos, though clearly geared toward a young audience, about the lifecycle of a frog.

Create an account for one or more of these tools, bring along a generous helping of creativity, a topic that needs splained (okay, that isn’t a real word. Sorry) and make some animated videos.