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Five Rules for Better PowerPoint Presentations -Michael Hyatt’s blog, Working Smart, has these 5 great tips to spice up your next PowerPoint. The article is written from a business perspective, but that doesn’t mean these tips won’t help you when teaching the Civil War or Beowulf. One of the more important tidbits of advice is #4: Less is More. Amen, Mr. Hyatt.

40 Places for College Students to Find Free Unabridged Books Online -Your students, whether they are going to college or not, can surely benefit from more reading. In a digital age, why waste all the paper it takes to reprint a book when they are often archived online. These resources are, of course, free and include a list of places you can download audio versions of your favorite classics. Thanks to Education-Portal.com

Eleven Worst Foods Americans Eat Daily - It might be high time to get back on a health kick for your author, and what better place to start than identifying and limiting or eliminating certain foods from my diet. You can get on the train with me, and start the school year off right. HealthAssist.net presents this list of 11 kinds of food you should think twice before eating. Unfortunately for you, me and the good people at Krispy Kreme, doughnuts lead the list. Bummer, Bear Claw.

(25) Funny Metaphors Used in High School Essays -Because we aren’t without a sense of humor around here, (hopefully, you have one, too) so here are Help.com’s 25 examples of ridiculous metaphors used by high school students in various essays. Please note: some of these might be considered similes.  Among my favorite: From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30 and He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something. - JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Are you looking for a new look for your data? Are you tired of the same old boring bar graph? Do you wonder if you have the right visual for the occasion? Will a line graph tell the story, or would a Venn diagram do a better job?

For answers to these and other vexing questions with graphics, check out A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods. This site lists the major (and minor) visualizations and separates them by category: data, information, concept, strategy, metaphor, and the combo special of the visualization world, the compound visualization. With so many choices, you’re bound to find the right one. Another version of this type of site is also available at Information Design Patterns.

After that, you’ll need some ways to make your visualizations come true, and plain old Excel by itself, may not make that happen. Fortunately, there are some options. One is Chart Chooser, which has ready-to-go templates for Excel and PowerPoint, organized by type. For the adventurous, check out Many Eyes, an online data visualization site from IBM, where you can view visualizations by others, or upload data of your own to play with. To broaden your palette to the possibilities, check out a site like information aesthetics which highlights new and innovative data design. Really, you’ll never use that default pie chart in PowerPoint again. -ALICE MERCER

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods
Information Design Patterns
information aesthetics - data visualization & visual design
Chart Chooser
Many Eyes

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PowerPoint Yourself in the Right Direction

You may have had the opportunity to read this earlier piece on Scott Elias and how to improve Power Point presentations. Dean Shareski adds his two-cents to the discussion in YouTube - PowerPoint Extreme Makeover, which gives concrete before-and-after examples with a few helpful tips.

The highlights:

1. More high-quality visuals: use a picture to not just illustrate but to tell the story;
2. Don’t try to make your PowerPoint stand alone, your delivery counts;
3. Don’t show the text you are reading in your narration;
4. Make the text you use stand out using contrast and fonts;
5. Get a remote clicker.

Stop killing your audience’s attention and start making killer presentations with these helpful tips. -ALICE MERCER

YouTube - PowerPoint Extreme Makeover
Do I Dare Disturb the Universe? - Presenting… Me!

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Make PowerPoint More Than a Snazzy Overhead Presentation

Witness the birth of a nation in bite-sized chunks. Famous Moments in Early American History is a collection of short presentations about…well, famous moments in early American History.

View the beginnings of the American Revolution in “The Shot Heard Around the World.” Or see what all the hubbub was about during Paul Revere’s famous ride in “Paul Revere, Messenger of the Revolution.” Each flash presentation contains several primary source images, including woodcuts, drawings and engravings.

Famous Moments in Early American History contains concise history lessons ideal for younger students first learning about American History. The videos also provide examples for students who want to play with PowerPoint or other presentation software for school projects. -BILL FERRIS

Famous Moments in Early American History

Photo Credit: Maulleigh on flickr.com.

Educational blogger Scott Elias is tired of your PowerPoint presentations. Yeah, you heard me. He’s sick of slides overloaded with information in small print, and he’s sick of presenters who read directly from their slides and then expect students write down what they see. You’re lucky that Elias isn’t the complaining type, though - he’s offering you some solutions.

In his presentation “Taking Your Slide Deck to the Next Level,” Elias offers some tips for effectively engaging an audience of students with visually appealing, pared-down PowerPoint presentations. He designed it for a small group of faculty, but thankfully, he’s sharing with all of us. You can get the presentation as a PDF file (which includes his notes), as a standalone series of slides through SlideShare, or as a Keynote file, if you happen to have that software handy. Elias tackles simple topics like color, shading, storytelling, passion, and putting yourself in the audience’s place to give you some easy-to-implement tips for engaging your audience, reminding us that “the slides aren’t the presentation - you are.” -ROSS WHITE

Taking Your Slide Deck to the Next Level (.pdf)

I’m an avid Microsoft Office user. I use Excel pretty much every day, and most of my posts on Instructify were composed using Word. Except for Word’s horrible table system, I really don’t have many complaints about it. But even a shill like me can’t resist the allure of OpenOffice, which does pretty much everything Microsoft Office does, except for free. Yeah, that’s right, free.

If you’re tired of receiving essays written in hen scratch on ragged notebook paper, tell your students to use OpenOffice Writer. Need to get organized, but don’t want to pirate your friend’s MS Excel? OpenOffice Calc will handle your spreadsheet needs. There’s a doppelgänger for pretty much any MS Office program, like PowerPoint and Access (I’ve never used Access and am not about to start just for this blog post, so you’re on your own as to how Access-ible it is). I wrote this post with Writer, and it appears to be compatible with all consonants and vowels. Best of all, I can save in MS Word format, so if I email a document to Bill Gates, he’ll be able to open it.

OpenOffice is a lot older than Instructify, so we realize we’re late to this particular party. Still, enough people don’t know about this great resource that we had to mention it. I highly recommend you give OpenOffice a try. Just think about how your administration will love you once you show them they don’t have to keep shelling out licensing fees to Microsoft. -BILL FERRIS

OpenOffice

You avid readers might remember a post a few weeks ago about PowerPointPalooza, a site which compiled a load of PowerPoint presentations for your classroom usage. Not to be outdone, but there is a slightly more comprehensive and less ComicSans ridden site out there. Check out SlideShare to get all sorts of slideshows for use in your classrooms, on your blogs, and for your own education. Topics range from creating open source software to “toilets of the world.” You can share your own slide shows here, or simply download those presentations that other users have allowed for download. You might not even need to download the presentations, though, as fullscreen view is available for all of the presentations. –JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

SlideShare

Let’s face it– it takes a lot of visual aid to make history engaging. In order to really get your students focused on the American Revolution or the rise of Charlemagne, sometimes it takes an extra step for them to visually experience the lesson. Luckily for us, that’s what PowerPoint presentations are for. But amongst all the grading, lesson pacing and everything else, who has time for creating them? Well, as it turns out, even if you haven’t, someone has, and they’ve created an online database just for you.

PowerPointPalooza is a site dedicated strictly to History lesson PowerPoint presentations. With more than 180 presentations in A.P. European and A.P. American History, as well as Global Studies, there is more than enough to choose from. The presentations vary in length from as little as a dozen slides to upwards of 140. Topics range from things like “Life in Gilded Age New York City” to “How To Do an AP Euro DBQ” and each are extensive, yet generic enough that anyone can find a way to personalize the information.

There are also some student projects available for download, so don’t hesitate to give your own students something to aspire to. If nothing else, PowerPointPalooza might just give you the inspiration you need to create your own database. (Please use less Comic Sans, though.) –JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

PowerPointPalooza