Breaking Textbook Barriers: PowToon Video in Engaging ICT Learning for Young EFL Learners

Abstract


Introduction
The Ministry of Education andCulture (Law Number 20 of 2003, 2018) decreed for the integration of education and technology to-in broad terms-increase the abilities of both students and teachers.This rule amongst other global drivers fuelled a considerable interest on the development of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the educational sector, and many innovative technologies have been applied both in the teaching-learning process and education administration.The concern of this study lies in the seemingly perpetual situation of uneven implementation of ICT at local level.Many institutions in Indonesia, as well as around the world, have trained their teachers and familiarised their students with stateof-the-art technologies, such as classroom immersion virtual technologies (Budiarti et al., 2023;Huang et al., 2023), artificial intelligences (Agustini, 2023;Baskara & Mukarto, 2023;Ruan et al., 2021), and gamification (Santosa et al., 2022;Shortt et al., 2023).However, this technological progress is rather centred to particular areas, typically those in and adjacent to government centres, so there remains a huge disparity of performance gap between rural and urban schools (Retnawati, 2019).Mustofa & Sari (2020), who recently published a study which aims to instruct teachers on how to develop and teach students' listening skills using This research is motivated to help the teacher increase the students' engagement.Mayhew (2020, p. 653) states "the new generation of student often seems to respond extremely well to the delivery of information in a much more visual medium."In this paper, the focus is on PowToon, which has been described by Rioseco et al. (2017) as a powerful didactic resource for pedagogy programs because it can support activities designed for the 'learning by doing' paradigm.Since the intention of this study is also to increase the teacher's ICT competence, introducing both the teacher and students with PowToon video-making platform is justified.While many other video-making platforms can also boast being places where beginners can easily and quickly create videos, PowToon is special because of its focus on animated presentation and the video worksheet's design is similar to PowerPoint worksheet (Wu et al., 2018), making it a fitting introductory platform for the teacher participant in this study.

Literature Review
There has been a considerable number of research on PowToon since this cloud-based animation software was introduced in 2012.Since it allows the public to easily create animation videos with their provided template designs, educators have readily learned to use it with the aim to enhance the teaching quality of their classrooms.Although this literature review is not systematic, the researchers noted that a large majority of the relevant studies come natural science teachers.Many of these studies were straightforward description of the PowToon classroom application conducted in the context of elementary level education (Marini et al., 2023;Pratiwi et al., 2021) and secondary level education (Basriyah et al., 2020;Susanti et al., 2023).One study investigated their PowToon application in the mathematical teaching of children with special needs, finding that a sign language companion is needed as a communicator regarding the response of the Powtoon animation media (Sugilar et al., 2023).Fontela & Moraes (2022) found evidence that students' video creation efforts elaborated a deepened comprehension on mathematical knowledge of areas and perimeters.
In the language education area, particularly in ELT context, existing studies tend to put forward the rationale of English language being a necessary skill in the increasingly globalised world (Anggeraini, 2018;Oktaviani & Mandasari, 2020;Rahmawati et al., 2021).PowToon has been applied to address teachers' concerns about the students' "lack" of reading skill (Apsari et al., 2023;Samosa et al., 2021), writing skill (Anita & Kardena, 2021), speaking skill (Syafitri et al., 2018).Overall, it seems that all these studies have reached the unanimous conclusion that PowToon has a positive impact in improving the skills that they chose to investigate.Besides the impact of PowToon on disparate skills that teachers desire to nurture in students, there are also studies which have focused on PowToon's classroom application's effect on the teachers.According to Raditya & Kristiani (2022), the use of PowToon is capable of reducing the anxiety of teachers.Their findings are reasoned with the common anxiety that new and inexperienced teachers have in the face of a typically silent classroom environment, but when they taught with PowToon videos the students were observed to be more "innovative" as they feel less bored.Faridah et al. (2020) and Gursoy & Goksun (2019) respectively investigated the experiences of pre-service EFL and science teachers in Breaking Textbook Barriers: PowToon Video in Engaging ICT Learning for Young EFL Learners multimodal content development, the latter specifically determining the effects of these experiences on their self-efficacy beliefs.Based on all of these evidence of how PowToon can be useful for both students and teachers, Babakina et al. (2021) published a practical step-by-step assistant for teachers and academic staff in creating an effective presentation using both PowToon (the "new" media) and PowerPoint (the "old" media).
Similar to this study, many of the cited studies described the application of PowToon videos which were created and taught by the teacher.A more student-centred approach that would involve the students being the primary creators throughout a study semester is described by Yuliani et al. (2021) who tasked the students' final project to create fictional stories with PowToon.This project pushed students to create a video from scratch rather than based on a given presentation template and significantly increased the whole classroom's collective digital competence.According to Wulan et al. (2022), digital multimodal composing does not only boost the students' digital skills, but also their English learning as the program is set in English, even in non-English majors.Having reviewed these studies, the researchers are more convinced of the benefits of this researcher-teacher collaboration project.

Method
The participants this study include twenty 5th grade students and one English teacher of SD Kartika Malang who were taking English as a core subject.This grade level was appropriate to introduce a change in the teaching style compared to 6th year final students who were occupied with exam preparations, and the class was selected because preliminary study revealed that the class would especially benefit more technological integration in their classroom lessons.Meanwhile, the teacher is the only person involved because the school only had one person as the English teacher from elementary grade one to six, who had 80 minutes of teaching time (once a week) for each class.
The design of this study is mixed methods, combining qualitative and quantitative data within four steps: analysing, designing, implementing, and evaluating (Lambert, 2019).The researchers collaborated with the teacher to design the new interactive teaching media with PowToon.Implementing The researchers delivered the PowToon video to material, media, and language experts to validate their effectiveness as teaching media.
The teacher taught the students using the PowToon video.

Evaluating
The researchers delivered a questionnaire to the students.
Interpreted the questionnaire results.
The first stage is the need analysis, which uses qualitative data obtained through two instruments: interview and observation.One-hour interview session was carried out once with the English teacher without involving the students as the purpose of this method is to obtain information about the teachinglearning process from the teacher's perspective.Observation was done by the researchers as an uninvolved outsider in the classroom to observe the students' attitude, noting their enthusiasm levels, activities, and overall lesson comprehensibility before introducing them with the PowToon video.Material explanation, teaching media, and the teacher-student communication were also of interest.The observation was done in one meeting (80 minutes).
The second stage is the design, where the researchers collaborated with the English teacher to create the media.Based on the teacher's suggestion and the syllabus progress at the time, two themes were selected from the class's official English textbook entitled 'My Next Words, Grade 5' (EYLC Team, 2021), namely 'Chapter 1. Self-Introduction' and 'Chapter 2. Places Around Town.'In this stage, the researchers actively worked with the English teacher in making the PowToon video, as the purpose of this project is to elevate not only the students' usage of ICT but also the teacher's skills.Refer to the textbook chapters and select the necessary information needed for the lesson plan.5 Save the video and publish on YouTube (or other social networking sites of the teacher's) to allow other people, namely the students, to view the resulting media.
After the PowToon video for the two book themes were finished by the teacher is the implementation stage.The teacher taught the class using the PowToon video as a new teaching method to break up the monotony of lecture and static PowerPoint slides, while the researcher observed the new teaching process.Before using the video in the next class, the researchers delivered the video to three expert validators that consisted of material expert (Assistant Principal of Academic Affairs and Curriculum of SD Kartika VI-7), media expert (Principal of SD Kartika VI-7), and language expert (an English teacher from a different elementary school) to validate the video as suitable media for the classroom.The three experts were recruited based on their competence in each of these three aspects of validity, following the example set by Mustofa & Sari (2020).They were each given three different set of questionnaires which consisted of five statements: one related to the material, the other related to media, and the other related to the language use in the PowToon video.The purpose of their validation is to review the PowToon video.The validity score was interpreted using Arikunto's ( 2013) validation equation and score categories.The fourth stage is the evaluation of the teaching intervention using the PowToon video.A different questionnaire was distributed to the twenty students after the lesson.The questionnaire consisted of six statements, measured with a scale of four criteria (1 = Bad, 2 = Fair, 3 = Good, 4 = Very Good).The questionnaire asked the participants to give a check (√) for the six items evaluating the lesson using PowToon video.The researchers referred to Sukardi (2022) to interpret the students' questionnaire responses and Agustin (2020) for the equation to calculate the percentage score.

Results
This study is motivated by the lack of ICT usage in the classroom and the observed lack of engagement from the students due to the monotonous lecture teaching style in SD Kartika VI-7.Thus, it sought to increase the ICT competence of a selected English teacher from an elementary level classroom through a brief but active collaboration to create multimedia content to increase the student engagement.The results will be divided based on the four stages of the research, as shown in Table 1.

Findings about the teaching-learning process from the analysis stage
This collaboration projects begins with an interview with a need analysis to further explore the challenges in the English teaching and learning process in the school, having briefly identified the lack of advanced ICT usage in the preliminary observation.The school only had one teacher to teach the English subject whom the first author interviewed.During the interview, the teacher explained that she had scarce references of teaching media, and her method is limited to teacher-centred lecture.In a routine manner, she would explain the material from the school textbook, ask the students to write the words form the available vocabulary list, and then ask the students to complete the tasks provided by the textbook.
The teachers' statements from the interview are supported by the second author's observation of one classroom session.The situation in the class was passive, and the group of students showed no enthusiasm based on the lack of initiative to ask a question, give a comment, or focused attention.The observation results showed that there was next to no technological use, except for the use of a projector to display a PowerPoint presentation.However, even the slides were not informative, including only a few pictures from selected words from the textbook's vocabulary list of the day's lesson unit.When the students did not initiate any action, such as asking questions, the teacher continued the lesson to the next part regardless of the students' level of attention.Overall, there was a distinct lack of student involvement, thus the engagement level of the teaching-learning process was minimal.

The researcher-teacher collaboration to create the new teaching material in the designing stage
In the design stage, the researchers discussed with the English teacher on how to create the PowToon video for the next few lessons.The themes selected from the book are the earlier chapters in the book in acknowledgement of the previous classroom's lack of student activity and interaction to practice English as a foreign language.These chapters were about 'Self Introduction' and 'Places Around Town.'As detailed in Table 2, the detailed procedure to create the media on PowToon is described and accompanied with screenshots of the platform.
Breaking Textbook Barriers: PowToon Video in Engaging ICT Learning for Young EFL Learners After signing up to register a new user account, the teacher was directed to the homepage of the PowToon website page.The first author, who was the most familiar with the platform, took the lead in guiding the teacher on how to create the video first by creating the self-introduction video.PowToon offers several ways to create the video in the beginning, which can be overwhelming for a novice content creator.The teacher decided to create a horizontal video as she intends for the products to be uploaded onto YouTube, the world-wide free platform to share multimedia content.Learning for Young EFL Learners scenes within the video.This functionality also facilitated the addition of backgrounds, properties, and characters, enabling the incorporation of images from the computer's gallery or those available within PowToon's repository.The selection of character movements was accomplished by engaging the humanoid icon.A variety of movements, including gestures such as waving hands and emotional expressions like happiness, sadness, fatigue, and others, were accessible.The process of incorporating text was initiated by activating the "text" button, while the inclusion of voiceovers or background sounds was enabled through the "sound" button.Both back sounds and voiceovers could be sourced from the user's personal computer or from the sound library provided by PowToon.At this juncture, the researchers recommended the teacher to simply use the available resources from PowToon's repository and worked with the teacher to match the selected materials from the textbook chapters with the appropriate animations.The arrangement of timing for each slide was executed by manipulating the ruler positioned at the bottom of the slide, with a maximum time allowance of three minutes.The teacher was given the opportunity to first decide on how long each scene will be, and the researchers only provided correction feedback to ensure that the scene length would be able to capture the students' attention in the following lessons.The effectiveness of the presentation was assessed by engaging the play button located beneath the slide illustration.Figure 4 shows a screencap of the video that has been created.

Validating the newly created video as an acceptable teaching media with experts in the implementation stage
Although creating education-related videos may be an easy task, especially with PowToon's ready-made templates, teaching materials ought to be checked by "a supervisor", essentially an expert, to ensure that they are acceptable media, such as not having anything inappropriate or too controversial in its context.Thus, the proposed video was consulted to three experts to test the validate the material, media, and language.
Breaking Textbook Barriers: PowToon Video in Engaging ICT Learning for Young EFL Learners The material expert was the Assistant Principal of Academic Affairs and Curriculum of SD Kartika VI-7 who was given five statements in the questionnaire: (1) Learning objectives are in accordance with the Basic Competence (KD) items in the syllabus, (2) Learning objectives are in accordance with the school curriculum, (3) The material in the video is complete and not overly lacking, (4) The relevance of the topic with the material is clear, and (5) The video contains clear explanations.Each of these items were given a high score (lowest 3.75 for statement 3; highest 3.95% for statement 1) by the expert.The material expert did not require any revisions to be done for the video, stating that it was acceptable as a new teaching media.

Figure 6. Result of Media Expert Validation
The media validation of the video was done by the Principal of SD Kartika VI-7.The questionnaire five statements which concerns the teaching media: (1) Animation and sound are in sync, (2) The content is appropriate for fifth grade students, (3) The animations are displayed well, (4) The proportion of the media is appropriate, and (5) The video is fairly easy to be understood.The media expert's evaluation scores for each item have more variety than the material expert but are also all high scores (lowest 3.75% for statement 3; highest 3.91% for statement 1).The expert's score shows that the media had good quality in view performance and has a high potential to grab students' attention with its audiovisual feature.The third expert is required to validate the language in the video.As the teacher whom the researchers collaborated with in this study is the only English teacher in the school, the language expert was an English teacher recruited from another elementary school.The five statements required the expert to validate the video's: (1) explanation, (2) diction, (3) vocabulary list, (4) comprehensibility, and (5) sequential presentation.This expert also gave high scores for each item (lowest 3.95% for statements 2, 3, 4; highest 3.99% for statement 5).The other school's English teacher agreed that the video's diction was using daily language which is familiar for the children, and this expert also did not suggest any revision for the final product.
Overall, the video created by the teacher and the researchers were well accepted by the experts in material, media, and language.The teacher taught the selected chapters' material in two meetings which the second author observed.The video seems to be well received by the students as it provided an entertaining and audiovisual demonstration of how to ask and answer questions about their name, address, age, date of birth, hobby, idol, favourite food, and all-time best movie in English.Observation of the PowToon video's implementation also revealed a different class atmosphere from the analysis stage's observation, as the teacher was able to refer to the video as a clear topic of discussion with the students and the students were able to copy and practice the video's material for their own self-introductions in the first meeting.In the second meeting, this lesson unit continued with the students having peer-to-peer conversation, practicing their English by asking their friends follow-up questions and volunteering to introduce themselves in front of the class upon the teacher's request.

Students' response to the use of PowToon video in the evaluation stage
At the end of the second meeting, the researcher delivered the questionnaire to the students to obtain their response to the new method.Considering that the students were unused to using technology in the classroom, the researcher distributed the questionnaire in paper form since the instrument only consisted of six items.The paper-based questionnaire also had the advantage of capturing the students' immediate impression of the new teacher performance with the teaching media.

Figure 8. Student Responses
The questionnaire responses from 20 students contained six items.From a scale of one to five, the students were asked to rate: (1) the video display, (2) the comprehensibility of the material, (3) the arrangement of the material, (4) the relevance of the material with real objects, (5) the vocabulary list, and (6) the class activity instructed in the video.All these items received high ratings (lowest 3.90% for statement 6; highest 3.99% for statement 3).This means that the students found the PowToon video's content effectively.
Observation also found their level of enjoyment in the first meeting (when the PowToon video was played) and the second meeting (when the video was not played but the activities were continued) were visibly higher than the previous classes observed in the preliminary and analysis stage.For the vocabulary memorising activity in particular, the teaching performance with the video was better than the previous PowerPoint presentations because the pictures of vocabulary were presented within the narrative of introducing yourself instead of an arbitrary list of words with images.The students were more active and enthusiastic, as seen by their initiative to copy the PowToon video's dialogue with their peers.The class ended with a positive note as the students requested the teacher to make another PowToon video for the next lesson.

Discussion
Multimedia presentations are increasingly preferred as a prominent method to visually enhance the delivery of theoretical information, to the point that it is considered almost a staple in the classroom as a smartphone is to an individual around the world.The forms of teaching that lacks the use of what is currently considered as modern technology has been gained the reputation as "traditional teaching," which current and future teachers are largely encouraged to move on from (Hockly, 2022).With increasing evidence of how student performance in e-learning is superior to in-person class performance (Mastour et al., 2023), there is more debate on the role of teachers.This study feels the need to first emphasise that it does not find traditional teaching method of teacher-centred lecture problematic, because any teaching method can serve the best in specific contexts.Research of the classroom use of PowToon is admittedly "overdone," and one may be critical of the benefit of replicating this type of research.But the nature of educational research ultimately calls for continuous evidence for theories as all existing research evidence "rarely provides unequivocal support [due to the] different local contexts in which teachers work" (Kerr, 2022, p. 116).This study's endeavour to help the English teacher in SD Kartika VI-7 to learn and adopt more technological approach in teaching is mainly motivated from the observation of the students' lack of engagement of the classroom's monotonous way of English language learning.In general, when students are introduced with new methods, their interests are piqued and they show higher levels of classroom engagement (Batubara et al., 2020;Shortt et al., 2023).This purpose is achieved through the application of PowToon in the context selected in this study, as results from the implementation stage confirmed that the students were more enthusiastic in the classroom after the teacher started teaching with a PowToon video.During the preliminary study, the teacher taught by giving a lecture of the textbook's material with a PowerPoint presentation showing a random set of pictures to associate the vocabulary list to be memorised in a rote manner.The classroom atmosphere was subdued, and the students were described by the teacher as only ever being "passive learners" as they either could not understand or did not pay attention in the class.In comparison, when the teacher introduced the PowToon video after it was validated by three experts, the students took the chance to imitate the PowToon animated character's example of selfintroduction.This is in line with Gui et al. (2023) regarding how visual demonstrations work very well for students, especially primary level children.
This study also found that the effect of the PowToon video was still profound as in the second meeting, even though the teacher did not use the same or another PowToon video, the fifth-grade students remained enthusiastic, and they continued to copy the words and phrases they practiced in the first meeting with their peers.Unlike in previous classes, the students volunteered to try introducing themselves in English in front of their peers.Furthermore, at the end of the second meeting, the students made a request for their teacher to make another PowToon video for the next class.This observation indicates how well-received the new teaching media is by the students.For the teacher herself, the most valuable lesson in this foray is arguably the students' high opinion about the arrangement of the material.The students' class performance when they were presented with an arbitrary series of images for the vocabulary list in the textbook were outperformed by their performance when the words were demonstrated within a narrative.Students tend to learn information better when presented as stories (Férez Mora & Coyle, 2023;Sunderland et al., 2021), and this is not exclusive to only primary learners.
However, it might be rash to assume that using PowToon videos will guarantee such an enthusiastic response from children.The researchers acknowledge that this positive impact may be attributed to the fact that the media is new technology for the students in this study.There is no definite timeline when individuals can be bored with a particular teaching, but many researchers have documented evidence of students being bored in technology-based learning because they "use technology too often" (Irawan et al., 2020).When a technology loses its novelty in the eyes of the students, they will start to disengage more frequently (Derakhshan et al., 2021;Yazdanmehr et al., 2021) and may misbehave (Hamuddin et al., 2022).Therefore, the teacher in this study was advised to continue creating appropriate PowToon or animated videos for the next few lessons but should also look take some time to try incorporating different multimedia content.This initiative is likened to a "do-it-yourself" attitude, which Ilyas et al. (2023) have associated to be a significant factor for digital entrepreneurship.
A final point to consider is whether this particular endeavour of "transforming" the previous lecture-PowerPoint-based teaching to the current PowToon-student activity-based teaching can be considered as "digital pedagogy."Many previous studies involving the use of PowToon or any other relatively recent Breaking Textbook Barriers: PowToon Video in Engaging ICT Learning for Young EFL Learners technology in the classroom make claims of demonstrating digital pedagogy (Fitriyah et al., 2022;Oktaviani & Mandasari, 2020;Syafitri et al., 2018), usually as variational terms of for the fact that PowToon is a digital medium.However, this study agrees with Hockly's (2022) assessment that simply using one or two digital tools, such as "combining" PowToon and WhatsApp Group (Ningsih et al., 2023), is not an example of good digital pedagogy.This is because the teacher would still follow the same teaching procedure whether they use digital tools or not, which is standing at the front of the class, providing examples, and instructing students to re-create more examples-"the digital technology does not really improve the lesson" (Hockly, 2022, p. 33).Fontela & Moraes (2022) also noted that even if the video production's burden is onto the students rather than the teacher, the organisation of these classes involving these digital tools should be questioned if the video production is still associated with the traditional class model.good example would be a computerised dynamic assessment which is unlikely to be done on paper (Ebadi et al., 2023), the flipped classroom as learners take control over their own learning (Hojeij & Ozdemir-Ayber, 2017), or students recording and releasing a multimodal media on social networking sites for peer-to-peer assessment (Blackwood, 2019).
Though this study achieved its intended purpose, it does have limitations which were realised postproject.The researchers did not systematically record the students' performance before and after the PowToon implementation, so there is no quantitative evidence of the students' classroom performance to compliment the qualitative evidence from the field observation.Following Bonfim et al. (2022) who pointed out that the limitations of characterisation of PowToon characters provided in the website can impact the students' narrative immersion, future studies may also find it valuable to investigate whether animated or live-action videos perform differently or investigate the nuance differences of teacher-made videos in comparison to student-made videos.

Conclusion
The purpose of this study is double-fold: to increase the classroom engagement of the fifth-grade students of SD Kartika VI-7 and to elevate the sole English teacher's ICT competence through a researcher-teacher collaboration of teaching with PowToon video.The results of this study showed that the students were exceedingly more motivated in their English learning as indicated by the various initiatives they have taken.
Since the dashboard has an aesthetic that is rather like Microsoft PowerPoint worksheet, this makes PowToon very friendly for the teacher in this study, as well as other educators who may also be only familiar with Microsoft Office products and not the popular or latest content creation platforms.This research is undoubtedly valuable in the context of the SD Kartika VI-7, but it also contributes to the larger mission of compiling evidence of how specific digital tools perform.

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. PowToon Template Selection Page PowToon offers many templates which are ready-made for novice video-makers, which includes backgrounds and animated characters with multiple voice variants.The template designs are tailored for various contexts, including ones with educational themes that the researchers and teacher chose.

Figure 3 .
Figure 3. PowToon Video WorksheetUpon selecting a template, the video processing was undertaken within the PowToon worksheet.The user creativity came to the forefront, necessitating tasks such as editing (text, time management, colour, character motion, voice, etc.).Next, the "scene" feature was used to create the intro, outro, and other specific

Figure 5 .
Figure 5. Result of Material Expert Validation

Figure 7 .
Figure 7. Result of Language Expert Validation of English Language Studies https://journal.unilak.ac.id/index.php/elsya294 Breaking Textbook Barriers: PowToon Video in Engaging ICT Learning for Young EFL Learners

Table 1 .
Table 1 details the general timeline of the steps in this research project: Research Steps

Table 2 .
Table 2 lists the steps of how to create the PowToon videos.Steps to make the PowToon Video Steps Activity 1 Visit the URL www.powtoon.comto begin creating the media on the website. 2 Click 'sign up' in the PowToon homepage for new users and register using Facebook or Google account.3 Click 'create' and choose a desired video template.4 Breaking Textbook Barriers: PowToon Video in Engaging ICT Learning for Young EFL Learners

Table 3 .
Expert Validation Analysis Score Category Description: X = Average score; ∑ = the total number of answer values from the validator; N = number of validators

Table 4 .
Student Questionnaire Score Category