Thing 07: Presentation Tools

Thing 07: Presentation Tools

This weeks resources were engaging. We’ve come a long way since PowerPoint!

Before I go any further, I have a confession and I hope that it’s okay that I completed the wrong  assignment that was geared towards this module. Last week, when I looked at Thing 06: Digital Storytelling, I also looked at Thing 07:Presentation Tools since I was unsure how they were considered "different". I guess I had both tabs open at the same time and was looking at the resources for both weeks, since I had an “Oh crap!” moment when I went to complete this modules reading and resources. I meant to submit a Powtoon for my assignment for Thing 06 Digital Storytelling and submit my Adobe Spark presentation for Thing 07 Presentation Tools. I had circled those two tools as ones that I was most interested in learning about….but submitted them in the wrong order. If it’s okay, since I got really familiar with Adobe Spark last week, I’d like to discuss Powtoon this week as well as other Presentation tools that I found helpful in the module..

I am a HUGE user and really enjoy Google Slides. I find Slides to be very intuitive and user friendly. One of the coolest things that I’ve recently become addicted to when it comes to Google Slides is a website called Slides Carnival. This website is a template repository and allows you to freely download really cool pre designed slides. However, what was transformative for me, was how the design of the slides made me rethink what is possible within a presentation. For example, in one of the templates, I encountered a graphic of a Mac computer that allowed for a slick insertion of a YouTube video. I use this template for book talks and include the title of a book, the author’s name and a one sentence summary along with a YouTube promotional video (book trailer) of the story. Looks like this:




I was a huge Prezi fan when I taught research in elementary school. Students made a lot of effective and thoughtful presentations using the tool. I really like that Prezi made kids think about their work being non-linear. I challenged kids to think about main idea and supporting details…..much like a concept map. A recent criticism that was brought to my attention was that Prezi is not ADA compliant? A few other librarians that I know refuse to use the tool because of that :/

Well, my time spent with PowToon was interesting. I experienced the gamut of emotions while using it: excited, pleased, frustrated, hating Adobe Flash, even more frustrated with the paywall then eventually satisfied with my learning & creation.

In the beginning, I was overwhelmed by all of the choices in templates and the amount of possibility for design. Eventually I settled in and went with a template that was aesthetically pleasing. I had a decent experience assembling my presentation - some things are intuitive - others can be a royal pain. I had no problem placing objects out onto slides and inserting text. A few times when slides got graphically intense, Adobe Flash crashed and gave me that old time Windows 98 panic moment as to whether or not I lost my entire project. Luckily, I had remembered to save along the way and didn’t lose my work to a crash. Adobe Flash crashed two more times along the way during graphically intense moments but for the most part it was stable.

The biggest pain for me was figuring out the timing of objects within my slides. It took me a good 20 minutes of dragging and tinkering to figure things out. I found myself wishing the timeline was a little bit more intuitive, like iMovie. I found myself going to help manual for things along the way and resourcing myself with PowToon YouTube videos.

But again, the aggravation was worth it. I have A LOT more to learn but ultimately PowToon is a practical tool and I can see myself using it with middle school kids. It’s the right amount of a technical challenge and has the resources for kids to be creative. It’s also useful for professional looking presentations or for integration onto a classroom website.

https://www.powtoon.com/c/c6NKq4ZSKHW/1/m

Good resources in this module, they all challenged me to think of creative applications and uses with students.