Band camp blog

Beautiful first day!

PowToon and 19 Pencils

An "alternative" to Powerpoint and Prezi - Powtoon.

Woot - I finally got a beta account to try out Powtoon.  It took about a week, but it was well worth the wait.  Yes, it is very cool, and pretty intuitive with a friendly user-interface.  There are still glitches and limitations (like not being able to add an image from computer, only from online source, or not yet being able to publish to Youtube) but overall, this has a LOT of potential.  I don't think of this so much as a replacement to powerpoint and definitely, but rather something to help to make a Prezi better.

Powtoon seems like a great way to incorporate a short movie, possibly with many quick facts and a voice-over for a portion of an existing Prezi.  I don't see this as any sort of replacement... yet.... because it only lets you do a continuous movie.  You don't have the option to flip through slides and talk about things in more detail.

The other site worth mentioning today is 19Pencils.  You can see a Powtoon about 19pencils HERE

Menograph Now Open to Public

Check out the just-released-to-the-public site Meograph.



You can see how this site is great for educators in it's ability to do timelines and story telling using web-based browsers such as chrome and integrating google earth to show locations.

Need a Limited # of Volunteers for Time Slots? -Check out Doodle.com

Got this email from a very awesome helpful parent:

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Someone asked about signing up for stuff online and I wanted to let you know about something I've used in the past that works great for organizing volunteers.  There is a website called www.doodle.com that helps in two ways and is totally free:

1. If you need to check availability for a meeting, let's say, you can throw out 3-4 (or 50) possibilities for date and time then e-mail a link to the folks who need to attend.  They simply check the possibilities they could attend and then you will see which of those choices will get the best attendance and choose that date and time for your meeting.
2. THIS IS THE ONE THAT WORKS FOR SCHEDULING TIME SLOTS  Let's say you need volunteers to chaperone 5 nights of band camp (or sell t-shits during an all day event, etc.) but you only need two people per time slot, here's how (each number is a new screen):
1.  Go to www.doodle.com and click on "schedule an event"
2. Fill in the title name and description, etc. (click next)
3. Click on each of the dates you need to cover (click next)
4. Write down the time slots for each date (or none if it's all day) (click next)
5. Under settings select "Limit the number of participants per option" and put in how many you need for each time slot (click next)
6. Under "You send the invitation" click "finish" and it will generate a link you can copy and paste into any email you want.

Just because it's easy, I set up an example you can check out here http://www.doodle.com/7rau55kfvqphf3c7 (that's the participant link) If you type in your name and start checking time slots like you want to volunteer, you will notice you can't click any that already has two people because I limited it to two in step 5 above.

Hope that helps!  It has saved me a number of times.

Add Signature to PDF in 1 Easy Step

If you have ever received a PDF attachment that needs to be signed, you've probably gone through the hassle of printing it, signing it, scanning it, then emailing it back to the sender. If you're a Mac user running OSX Lion there is an easier way to sign PDFs. Tekzilla shows you how 

This post originally appeared on Free Technology for Teachers .

Marching Band Folio Layout Page Creation in Finale

My first Finale Tutorial video:

Instant feedback and testing using Socrative

Go to http://www.socrative.com/

Here is a quick start tutorial on socrative: