I read the articles for this assignment and looked at all of the tools.  I have some familiarity with Animoto and I have had a voice thread off of my webpage at school.  It has not been working too great and probably has something to do with the fact you cited that it is no longer free.  I also signed up for storybird and am looking forward to using that.  

I wanted to do something for this assignment that I could use at school and in order to do that I needed to test what would work on the chromes that are used for school.  So Animoto was out as it is not accessible through the firewall so I settled on Pow Toons.  

Attached is the Pow Toon that I did for a project that is upcoming with fourth graders.  I found it fairly easy to use.  I had some difficulty deleting the hands that transitioned that I didn't like and whenever I tried to insert a voice over the whole thing crashed which is probably on account of the chrome books and the IT department. 

 I had fun doing this and here is the link:

https://www.powtoon.com/online-presentation/fPkVm00CTT6/barackobama/?utm_source=transactional&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Transactional-Publish-success&mode=movie#/