Wednesday, October 22, 2014

A Powtoon Mole-o-ween!

Recently I wrote about the makeover of my Mole Day project from a traditional task to a digital one.  Tomorrow is Mole Day and I am on pins and needles to see what my students come up with.  I made some suggestions for digital tools that students could consider -- Prezi, Thinglink, Haiku Deck, and more -- but students were free to choose any tool as long as it is digital.  

I always present a Mole Day project that I created myself, partly so they have one as a model and partly because I want to show my enthusiasm for trying to understand how big 602,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 things would be.  I was debating what digital tool I would use -- something easy enough I could do it efficiently, but challenging enough that it looks showy -- when I got an email from Powtoon announcing their Halloween template.  I really like Powtoon and the theme of Mole Day is "Mole-o-Ween," so I decided to give it a go.

It only took me about 15 minutes to make a couple quick changes to the template and create a 28 second video that I can share with my students.  All of the heavy lifting was done by Powtoon.  I changed some words and moved some images and here's what I came up with:


If you haven't tried Powtoon, it's worth a look.  They have a nice 4Edu account for educators and this fall they are giving away free premium accounts for teachers that have 60 classroom accounts for students.  You can start with a template or a blank screen, so there is something for every level of technology-ready.  

My first Powtoon was an attempt to reinforce for students the graphic relationship between two things that are directly or inversely proportional.  I searched other videos looking for just the right thing, but, when I didn't find it, I used Powtoon to create it.  Here is that one:

I hope by Friday or Saturday I will be ready to share the Best of Mole Day.  Come back and check them out.

1 comment:

  1. (second try). Seeing your excellent video about Mole-o-ween reminds me of one of my favorite questions, found in the book "A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper" by Paulos: You fill a standard soft drink can with poison made up of molecules roughly the size of water molecules. You dump the contents in the ocean and let them disperse. If the contents spread uniformly over the world's oceans and you fish out a can of ocean water then, about how many molecules of poison do your expect to get in the can? (the answer, over 1000, assumes that the oceans have an average depth of 1 mile.)

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