I rarely have a review item that isn’t just amazing, but boy lately I’ve had some stinkers! Unfortunately part of the job is telling my real opinion, even if I think the product stinks. One product I think stinks, Puppetools. Please, please, really I’m begging you, don’t waste your money there! Why you ask?What could possibly be that bad? Oh shall I count the ways it rips?
1- Overpriced- Costing $20 for a 60 day trial, or $99 a year, the price is outrageous for the absolutely minisule amount of content.
2- Complete lack of content- The whole website is dedicated to the use of puppets in education, a very great idea. However, the entire website comes across as a sales pitch. It doesn’t seem like “oh this is the site I paid for,” but more like “oh so they want me to pay for more info? where?” As if they are pitching the use of puppets to get you to sign up for the actual site. After you log in you have access to videos of people using puppets, because of course you’ve never seen that before! Only about 30 actual puppet patterns, and a very few videos of how they construct their puppets. I found their instructions to leave me more puzzled then creative, and I craft all the time! You can also see pictures of lots of other puppets people have made, in case you are so uncreative that you can’t think to make a bear puppet, or a dog puppet. You can really see everything the site has to offer in an hour or less. If they offered a free one hour trial, or even paid 3 day trial, I doubt anyone would need to log in again after that! They would have no sales at all!
3- Complete lack of creativity- Seriously everything I saw was SO obvious. If you make a bear puppet, did you know you could use a “low, gruff voice” to make the bear talk? No? Really?? DUHH!!
4- The man’s voice in the videos is dull and boring.
5- The hinge technique they use for puppets, while producing more options for puppet decorating, I found to be MUCH harder to control. A paper plate folded in half is an easy alternative!
6- The whole website really is about WHY you should use puppets, not anything exceptional to put into use. I can read reports about how play is important to learning without having to pay for it. If I pay for a puppet site, I want good, useful, creative ideas for exactly that, puppets!
The only time I’d recommend this site to ANYONE is if you had absolutely NO creativity and wanted to waste money. Even if you are uncreative, this website won’t exactly bring you ideas. So really I’d NEVER recommend this to anyone! To me, even if 20 teachers went in and paid for it together, paying only $5 a piece, they wasted their money. Really the website should just be a free (or insanely cheap) educational reference. I don’t really understand what you are paying for! There is so little content. From what I can tell the only new content is pictures uploaded by other users, not the sites creators.
I could continue, but really, just spend your money somewhere else! If you want to spend $99 that badly, stock your craft area with felt, craft foam, google eyes, and more and make your own puppets!
