BY BILL FERRIS
Students have gotten used to doing things electronically. Your classroom doesn’t have to be an exception thanks to LectureTools, a learning management thingy from the University of Michigan.
Developers designed LectureTools with huge, impersonal college lecture courses in mind. However, there’s a lot here that K-12 teachers can use, too (though some of them would probably be best suited for 1:1 laptop environments). (more…)
Six Ways to Transform your Presentation
I’m still learning the whole presentation thing. I’ve probably made every classic presentation mistake, from mumbling to mistaking my PowerPoint slide show for an outline. Stepcase Lifehack has a great list of presentation tips for n00bs like me. Number one: ditch PowerPoint. I tried this for my last presentation and found it very liberating. This info will help you prepare a conference presentation, make your daily teaching more engaging, or come in handy for the forensics team.
26 Must-Have Free Fonts
Have you deleted Comic Sans from your computer yet? If not, I’ll wait here while you do that. Good. Now that that overused typeface is out of your life forever, what will you use for your bulletin boards and newsletters? Presidia Creative brings you 26 free fonts that will make your art projects and handouts look more slick. You’ll never need Comic Sans again.
Five Best Free Data Recovery Tools
Nothing places hard drives in more peril than finals week. At this time of year, the vengeful god Murphy inflicts horrible maladies upon the data of students and teachers worldwide for not heeding his law. Fortunately, atonement is within reach. Lifehacker has a rundown of five data-recovery tools that can bring Little Johnny’s term paper back to life just in time for him to print it out so his dog can eat it. -BILL FERRIS
Photo credit: Photocapy on Flickr.
Maybe Microsoft’s PowerPoint is one of the easier tools out there for bringing multimedia into the classroom, but it is still time consuming. In the chaos of the school year, few of us find the time to develop text, search for images, or download audio to create the kinds of multimedia presentations that can turn a mediocre lesson into an engaging, big-screen event.
Luckily, the website Pete’s PowerPoint Station offers literally hundreds of free PowerPoint presentations on academic subjects ranging from plants to government, from nutrition to ABCs. Once you download a presentation, you can easily change the order of the slides, edit the text, or change the images. In fact, if you or your students are new to the PowerPoint application, it may be more fun to learn the program’s functions by editing an existing presentation than by starting with a blank template. Editing might not be optional in some cases: the available presentations vary significantly in age-appropriateness, content, and (ahem) quality. Pete’s PowerPoint Station also offers links to related websites for students to use, but its real strength lies in the range of already-prepared PowerPoint presentations that will spice up your existing materials.
With Black History Month just ahead, I am off to choose from among the 15 already-prepared PowerPoint presentations to bring some new imagery and information to me and my students. – ABBY MARTIN
Sometimes I think about how the internet has become such a dominant presence in our lives and how it’s changed everything about how we communicate with each other around the world, and I get scared. I mean, I once used Skype in order to have a quick meeting with a professor who was in China, and it was like we weren’t even half the world away from each other. We were just looking at each other and talking about normal stuff like we would in person. With all of these new web-based technologies, sometimes I worry that we will never ever have to leave our houses again in order to do the things we do everyday. That’s the scary part. What if the internet turns us all into reclusive hermits who never have to leave the house because we can teach our classes, attend our meetings, and meet our friends for lunch over the internet?!?!
Contributing to my paranoia and hysteria is Dimdim, a web-based conferencing tool that makes it easy to not only have a web conversation, but also allows you to show pictures, PowerPoints, PDFs, live screens, and even video as part of your conversation. With Dimdim, you don’t even need a desktop client like Skype or Outlook, and it’s totally free. Basically, it is so advanced and so effective, you may never have to leave your house again.
Dimdim is a great site to use to set up a “virtual classroom” and share class materials on the web, or even to gather colleagues from around the world for a quick meeting. Just remember that even though the internet has made it so that we don’t have to go outside anymore, you should step out and see the sun every once in a while. -LAUREN FROHNE
Grab students’ attention before class with PowerPoint. Yeah, that’s right, with PowerPoint
Find cool tools for teachers: interactive professional development in Second Life
The holidays are nearly upon us, and so is all the stress that accompanies them. I don’t just mean the stress from exploding turkey fryers or engaging in hand-to-hand combat with other holiday shoppers. I’m talking about midterms, research papers, and presentations—and you get to grade them!
SlideRocket isn’t really going to help you with the midterms or papers, but it will go great lengths towards making your students’ presentations look awesome. Delivering professional quality design through a web-based application, SlideRocket makes PowerPoint look like a joke. Since it’s a web app you won’t have to use up space on your hard drive and you won’t have to mess around with all that payment and registration business. Boasting an impressive library of image effects and stylish options for representing data, SlideRocket also lets you import media from Flickr, YouTube and other sites with ease. That’s World Wide Internet interconnectivity.
How many times have you thought to yourself, “If I watch one more PowerPoint, I’m going to claw my eyes out”? How many times have you taught from a clunky, outdated PowerPoint slide show? I’m certain you felt a sneaking suspicion that people were about to claw their eyes out. Its not always what you’re saying so much as how you’re saying it. Add a little style with SlideRocket. -NICK YINGLING
Animate your lessons with Animoto
Grab students’ attention before class with PowerPoint. Yeah, that’s right, with PowerPoint.
Avoid Killing Students’ Interest and Attention with Power Point
Let’s face it, PowerPoint presentations and slide shows can be pretty darn boring, especially for students. So wouldn’t it be great if there were a way to jazz up your lessons a little bit with engaging slide show videos without needing lots of technical video editing skills? Well, there is!
Animoto automatically generates professional-quality videos that are fully customized with your images and music. The really cool part is that Animoto actually analyzes your images and music and combines them in an atheistically pleasing way that compliments your content. And you can easily embed your videos on your blog or website, or email them to your students or colleagues.
The possibilities with Animoto are endless. Spruce up your lesson on The Great Gatsby with an introductory video depicting the pop culture of the Roarin’ 20s. Or help your students visualize a science experiment with an engaging and informational video beforehand. Also, check out the ways other educators have used Animoto to add visual energy to their lessons at Animoto for Education. — LAUREN FROHNE
Make screencasts with free CamStudio software
For those of you who use PowerPoint (or are willing to, when it’s useful), you might consider creating a series of short slide shows that can run in automated mode as your students are entering your classroom. I’ve been doing this for several years now at conference presentations, and it works really well to get the audience engaged and warmed up as they come in and find seats. They actually start talking to each other about the session topic!
I use a combination of these kinds of things for my conference pre-presentation shows:
Teachers can use this to remind students of content from the previous class, or as a way to introduce content in the current class. Or perhaps as an additional reminder to students about upcoming tests or papers.
You can set up any slide show in Power Point to run automatically, and you can determine the amount of time each slide will display before the next one appears. -ELIZABETH A. EVANS
Elizabeth A. Evans works for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Information Technology Services.
Avoid Killing Students’ Interest and Attention with Power Point
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
Related Stuff:
300 Million Americans or “Wait, Someone Moved, Now We Have to Start Over”
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:
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!
Related Stuff:
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
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
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
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
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