Web of the Week Wednesday: PowToon

Web address: http://www.powtoon.com

There are a variety of Presentation tools out there on the interwebs but occasionally one comes along that really changes things. PowToon just might be one of them. This online tool allows you to create quick short simple explanations of complex ideas. It is a great site for building the introduction to concepts in class. In addition to the great options for individual use, you can also get Educator Pricing. It brands the videos as PowToon4edu but other than that it's pretty much the same. It costs $75.00 a year which is a bit pricey, but there is a free version which allows fewer downloads and shorter Presentoons but for the money it's worth it. You can find the educator pricing here: http://www.powtoon.com/pricing/edu/

Tech Tip Tuesday: Make a Ringtone

If you are an iOS user, you may be like me and disappointed that they took away the feature that allowed you to create RingTones from your music. If you look around on the interwebs you can find instructions for doing it manually. It involves several steps and renaming and moving files. It seems to be all legitimate since you own the music. But it is a lot more convenient to just buy the music ringtones so thats what a lot of people do.
On Android, I had a great little App called RingDroid it allowed me to trim a 30 second section of any song on my device and then save it to the RingTones settings.  It was pretty great.  I have looked around for something similar on iPhone.  No such luck.  But if you are looking do to this I did find a great little App in the Mac App store. Free RingTone Maker allows me to browse my playlists and music from iTunes. I can then trim the section I want to make a ringtone and with just a couple of clicks it puts the trimmed file back into iTunes as a RingTone.  It also works by dragging and dropping .wav and other files into the App and even lets you directly record using the onboard mic.
Give it a try!