Just Keep Strumming!

Welcome back!

This week I have started learning chords and strum patterns on the ukulele. They are harder than they look! I’m going to have to continue working on them throughout the next week, as well as work on my timing. Watch the Powtoon below to see and hear everything that I learned about chords and strum patterns this week!

Powtoon Review:

Powtoon is an online video-making website. Personally, I find this website to be a mix between iMovie and PowerPoint. I have used both of these applications, so it did not take my long to navigate through and understand the website. I found it to be very user friendly though, and it has a website tour, so I think that it would be easy enough for anyone to use.

When making an account, Powtoon asks for a purpose for using the website, so it can personalize the experience. I put that I was using the websitefor education as a student, and my homepage displayed student, teacher, and administrative templates.

For projects, a pre-made template or a personal PowerPoint slides can be used. A blank template can also be used for a completely fresh start! I opted for a blank template for my Powtoon project. If a blank template is chosen, one of three modes are available. These modes are capture, horizontal, or square. For the purpose of my video, I chose the horizontal mode. There are also different looks available for Powtoons. I chose the whiteboard look.

Powtoon can be used for free with lots of options for quality videos. Personally, I would not recommend paying for Powtoon Pro, Pro+ or Agency unless needed for a business or advertisement purposes. These options are quite expensive, and the website is good without paying for extras. The only drawback I found with the free version is that videos are limited to three minutes.

Powtoon videos can have music (there are various free music options to choose from), transitions, voiceovers, characters, text, props, shapes, images, videos, and other special effects! I tried to incorporate as many of these aspects as possible.

Powtoon can be used for group projects, too! All one needs to do is add any partners’ email addresses after hitting the invite button. I like this feature, so everyone can add to the project from their own devices.

In terms of the SAMR model, Powtoon is somewhere in between Augmentation and Modification. It has “functional improvements” to PowerPoint. The video can be played in an easier way. One does not need to search through all of the tabs at the top of the PowerPoint application to adjust timing and transitions. On Powtoon, the timing and video options are all right under the slides, and one just moves items along the timeline in the order they would like. Further, Powtoon mixes PowerPoint and iMovie together for a “task redesign.” The website used a very similar layout as iMovie with the ability to make informational slides like PowerPoint! In my own classroom, I would use Powtoon for projects that I would have originally used PowerPoint to add some variety.

See you next week!