Presentation Tools At Their Finest

Blast Off

In class last week, we got to talk to Astronaut Abby (Abigail Harrison) an 18 year old, who wants to be a scientist and astronaut. If she becomes an astronaut, she wants to be one of the first people to go to Mars. She is also the founder of The Mars Generation, a nonprofit organization with a focus on building a stronger tomorrow by energizing our youth about space and educating kids and adults about the importance of deep space exploration. After talking to Abby, we talked about new presentation tools such as Animoto, Pixton, GoAnimate, Powtoon, Google Slides, Office Mix, Prezi, Sway and Haiku Deck. We then had to create a short presentation about what we are going to be doing over spring break.

The NEW Animoto for Education

Animoto is a video creation service that you can add photos, video clips, and music and put them into a video slideshows. The site is updated all the time and it even has a mobile app. Animoto is free for Educators and is a useful tool for the classroom. Animoto can be used in the classroom for countless projects. Students can use the tool to present a concept and a teacher could use it as an introduction to a lesson. I think Animoto is really cool and helpful, I just made a 2 minute video for class trying to get people to switch to my major.

What is Microsoft Sway?

Microsoft Sway is a wonderful new edition to the Microsoft family. Almost everyone is familiar with the main members of the Microsoft suite such as, PowerPoint and Word, but there is no in-between for these programs. PowerPoint is made for formal presentations and Word is mainly used for reports and long writing assignments. Sway is that perfect in-between program that can be used for report summaries, informal presentations, or individual presentations. Sway is not meant for large audiences, but for individual viewing. You cannot create content in Sway directly, instead, you can import content from vastly different sources. You can link your OneDrive, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, OneNote, and many more. You can import information from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint into Sway. Sway also lets the user copy and paste a link to the Sway presentation, rather than uploading an entire file, which can help people share information quicker than before. Sway is made for tablet, phone, as well as, computer viewing. This enables the viewer to interact with the Sway presentation easier than a PowerPoint file or Word document.

5 Reasons to Replace 

PowerPoint with Google Slides

The article, “5 Reasons to Replace PowerPoint with Google Slides”, perfectly summarizes the benefits of Google Slides versus PowerPoint. Many presentations are made by multiple individuals. Usually, everyone gathers their information, and then relies on one person to put it all together into a presentation. With Google Slides, everyone can freely edit, comment, chat, and change slides without having to share one file. I like the restricted effects that Google Slides has. I find that many PowerPoints are so polluted with fancy transitions and spinning bullet points that it creates a “cheap” look and feel to the presentation. Google Slides is now offering offline access with their Google Slides App. Their app automatically syncs any changes made by any user and saves it, which can be downloaded and used without internet access. Google Slides allows the user to edit and add slides from their phone or tablet. Google Slides also allows anyone with the link to present and share the presentation. No more worrying if someone brought the flash drive with the PowerPoint document, simply login to your google account and everything is updated and linked. This also makes sharing and web publishing easy. You can either send someone a link to your presentation with permission to “edit” or permission to simply “view” the slides. Overall, Google Slides is incredibly better than PowerPoint in various different areas. 

Pop Art on Twitter

This week on Twitter, I did a bunch of things. I made a video presentation on what I was going to do on spring break. I made the video using PowToon. I really enjoyed using PowToon, it was easy and fast to use and I would definitely use it in the future. On Twitter, I also found this cool article about how to make pop art using Adobe Capture and Adobe Illustrator. The article shows you how to take a picture of an object then place it into Illustrator and make it stand out by using certain tools and colors.