composing good writing skill, as well as improving
their English skill.
However, since the questionnaire show more
than 70% of the students are not familiar with
Powtoon., some challenges arose as they tried to use
it for designing presentation. Some technical issues
are related to computer or laptop as their media to
work and also the internet connection. The first
challenge was Powtoon requires certain computer or
laptop specification to run smoothly. In fact, some
students’ computer did not meet the specification
and force them to work extra with time as the
program did not run normally. Another challenge is
that Powtoon requires lots of data connection as the
features selections are various. The availability of
Wi-Fi helped some students to work fast as the
connection was more stable yet others still depended
on portable modem or their mobile phone that
worked as data connection source. To overcome the
challenge, students were suggested to work in a
coworking space, campus, or public spaces that
provided free and fast internet connection.
Besides technical issue, time limitation of free
version of Powtoon somehow limited the students to
explore the media maximally. The five minutes
allowance in free version forced them to cut some of
the content that had been prepared in the beginning.
Furthermore, some pro features were only available
in pro version, so they still had limitation to design
the content maximally. In addition, for some
students who had little interest in design, Powtoon
was such a burden since they have to start designing
from a blank space. They felt that it took more time
to think about the design rather than composing the
content, as it can be seen in figure (3).
Figure 3: One challenge in using Powtoon.
4 CONCLUSIONS
The implementation of Powtoon in this study is to
optimize students’ skill in designing presentation.
Through one-week introduction and two weeks
observation, some positive responses toward the
application has been given by the students who
admit that Powtoon offers advanced features of
design such as various animation, music, and stop-
motion. However, limited duration of displaying
presentation which only provides five minutes and
some technical issues such as internet connection
makes it difficult for the students to obtain the
optimal result of their presentation design. This
study also suggests that the role of lecturer is vital in
minimizing the possible troubles by guiding,
monitoring, correcting, and evaluating the whole
process.
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