Skip to main content

Powtoons - LOVE!



Here is my new favorite tech program - PowToon. It is a free animated video presentation tool that is very easy to use. I used it with groups of 5th graders who made a group presentation on the need for after school clubs at their school - see their full presentation HERE. I was so impressed with the student's work that I went home and made a "commercial" for our tech department as a way of playing with the site (the cat thing in the commercial is a running joke with our team so I had to work it in).

A couple of things...the website requires Flash so it can not be used on iPads (which was a bit of a problem because we have a 1:1 iPad program in our 3-5 classrooms). When we used it we booked the computer lab and used a few student laptops. The free version is limited but not so much so that it was debilitating. You can't download but you can work around it by uploading it to YouTube (an option under the free version) and then using a YouTube downloader to pull it off the site. 

We found the sound hard to deal with. You can record within the program and their help videos suggest recording BEFORE making the video but that didn't work for students (they need to see the video progress in order to record). We worked around that by using the free recording software Audacity and using the "snap screen" feature so students could record on one side while viewing the video timing on the other side. 

The educational pricing is very reasonable for full access (but you can also use the free version - which is what we used). 

If you have time between now and the end of the school year have students try it out!


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Digital Citizen Cards

This project idea came from a monthly challenge put out by Adobe Express. We have the free EDU version deployed in our district and I thought this might be fun to try with a class. I liked that there was a prize element where the students could win a classroom set of hero cards  and it tied in with Digital Citizenship Week (October 17-21).  I teamed up with an elementary technology lab teacher and we decided to try it with one fifth grade class.  We looked over the available templates and decided we liked the layout of the 6-8 template the best (because they had to list advice for staying safe online).  One of the best things about these Adobe monthly challenge templates is that they can be modified. The revised template can then be sent to students via a link or through Google Classroom.  All the templates for this challenge Adobe gives you a sample template with sample wording but we wanted students to come up with their own wording. Neither one of us was ke...
Post a Comment
Read more

Secret Messages - How To (Light and Color)

This was fun activity that I got from Roper Mountain Science Institute. They suggested red theater gel to reveal the message, which can get pricy. Another idea I heard was to ask movie theaters to donate left over 3D glasses, which also have a red filter. A guest speaker we had last year said red jello would work. Tried it this week and it worked like a charm. The students thought it was very cool. I found my "attention challenged" students had trouble focusing on making their own secret messages so I was very glad that I had made extra copies of the sheets from the GEMS Color Analyzer book that they could color and then check under the jello.
2 comments
Read more

Random Idea - Website Domain Name

For the past two years I have purchased a yearly subscription to a stand alone website (School World) which I love. I did this because our district was using a very nonuser friendly website for its teachers and I was tired of not being able to do what I want with the website they had given me. I got the idea of a separate website from one of my son's teachers who had done the same thing years ago, she used a different teacher website then School World but it was the same principle. The yearly subscription rate for my own website was $35 and was extremely reasonable. I simply provided a link on my district website to my new site. The district did not have a problem with this. Several teachers were doing it. I am one of these "don't ask...don't tell" teachers so even if there was a problem I wasn't going to find out about it :) Last year the rest of the fourth grade team purchased subscriptions to the site as well. We also purchased our own domain names throug...
1 comment
Read more