GoAnimate was a "no-go"

So I thought it would be a very cool culminating activity for my students to use GoAnimate to create a cartoon clip of how an interview should go.  When we first turned to the website, it seemed like it captured their attention!  #eduwin I thought to myself!  Then, things went downhill.  First, I had some students who chose to use the technology inappropriately, getting the characters to say inappropriate things.  Needless to say this was frustrating.  Secondly, and perhaps even worse, there were no SAVE capabilities!  Apparently as Go Animate has gotten more popular, the "free" features have become less and less.  This was really disappointing and kind of put a kibosh (sp?) on the lesson.  At least I tried....

The alternative suggested was PowToon.  I directed some students to try this site, however, I found it to be MUCH less user friendly.  The students were not able to pick it up on their own and since I had only prepped with GoAnimate, I wasn't of much help to them.

As I use new tools like this, a question I struggle with is how much time to spend to "teaching" the tool.  In this case, I did not want to spend an entire class period teaching how to use PowToon so they could use it for this one assignment.  If it was something more globally useful, say Prezi, I would in fact dedicate the time.  But, in this instance, with an already jam packed curriculum it just wasn't something I could devote the time to.