Presentations Beyond Power Point

Powerpoint is a great tool. It’s easy to use, allows for (some) individuality, and can be found on most computer desktops whether mac or pc. While most of the students I’ve seen work with Powerpoint do so with ease I tend to find that most of the presentations come out basically looking the same. Which gets boring. This week’s Wednesday Web features Web 2.0 applications that can be used in place of Powerpoint. Some of these have made their way onto various Wednesday Web posts already; hopefully you’ll begin to see how applicable they can be in your classroom, no matter what the subject is.
Coincidently, I’ve created a “kid-friendly” handout with brief explanations of each application for students. If you are interested, let me know.

Start with some brainstorming....

Bubbl.us

This on-line concept map is a great way to get students organized.




Brinkpad

BrinkPad is a web application that brings a desktop experience to the web. The application allows you to create presentations / slide shows / drawings with easy to use web delivered software. Haven’t used it yet with students so I’m not so sure about it, but it’s an option.



Glogster

A Glog is a kind of poster - fully designed by you! A Glog is a fancy creation from text, images, music and video. It can be embeded in blogs or wikis (or you can print it out). The education page has a free teacher’s guide that can be downloaded and has a ton of educational resources and tutorials. I’ve created glogs for workshops and embedded them into wikis before. I even know of a school that had their kids create “prevent cyberbullying” glogs and post them in a wiki.



Blabberize

Blabberize is one of my favorites. It’s simple and fun. You upload a picture, cut out the mouth of the person in the picture, then record your own voice to make the picture talk. You can create more than one and stitch them together to give the appearance of people talking to each other . I’ve created examples where a person gives a short autobiography of their life, and others where animals talk (the one I created was about a turkey persuading people not to eat him).


Animoto

Animoto generates video slideshows. Simple to use: upload images, select music, and “go”. Anyone can create a 30 second slideshow for free. If you would like to create anything longer you can pay $30 for unlimited use for a year or $3 per video. Educators can get a free “all access” pass for 6 months by applying, but it takes a few weeks for Animoto to get around to this. I’ve seen teachers have their students create book trailers for novels. You can add text slides but are limited to 30 characters total- this can be good, forcing the students to have to really plan out what text to display. Here's an example of one I did as a thank you for the recent notebook donation.



Xtranormal

This is a super cool site. I’ve seen it used, but haven’t tried it yet with students at my school. With Xtranormal you type in text, choose avatars and a movie becomes generated of the conversation.



Wordle

If you read the Wednesday Web you know I love Wordle. Wordle creates tag clouds of words. Students might choose to create a Wordle as a summary. If you complete a unit project where you are looking for a reflective wrap up of a unit, consider having the students generate Wordles then come up and have the other students infer what they were trying to get across.



Voicethread

From their website: A VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images, documents, and videos and allows people to navigate pages and leave comments in 5 ways - using voice (with a mic or telephone), text, audio file, or video (via a webcam). Share a VoiceThread with friends, students, and colleagues for them to record comments too. There is also an educator’s guide available at http://ed.voicethread.com/help/manuals/. Use this site to have students who work on collaborative projects give commentary on the project.



Tikatok

I'm still learning about Tikatok (and finding that their customer service is slow to respond to inquiries). Tikatok allows students to create books on-line. They can scan in their own drawings and type out the text. E-books (pdf files) can be purchased for $2.99 and soft and hardcover books can be purchased for additional fees.



My Plick

From their website: Myplick is a free service that lets you share, embed and discover presentations and slide shows online. You can upload your presentation documents in a variety of formats such as powerpoint, pdf, openoffice odp, etc. If you need to add narration or sound effect to your presentation, you can upload an audio file and have the option to synchronize the audio with your slides using our online easy-to-use sync tool. Once a presentation is made, you will have the choice to either publicly share with everyone or only share it within a small private group. You will also be able to find out how users are viewing your plick, for example, how much time people stayed on each slide. User feedbacks and statistics like this will help you to improve your presentation making skills. This might be good for those students who don’t want to give up Powerpoint just yet.



Photostory

Photostory 3 is a free download from Microsoft. With it you can create presentations with special effects, audio and commentary. For those of you with pcs, you also have Windows Movie Maker already installed on your systems. Here’s a great guide for Photostory: http://eduscapes.com/sessions/powerpoint/photostorydirections.pdf




For those of you who just can’t let go of Powerpoint, Annette Lamb has created some awesome resources called “Powerpoint sidekicks”. She’s got some great project ideas as well.

http://eduscapes.com/sessions/powerpoint/index.htm