Digtial Presentations - For You and Your Students

We are all guilty of exhausting our kids with Power Point Presentation Lectures.  We are also guilty of assigning the students a Power Point Presentation for a project.  Time to think outside the PPT Slide Box.  There are multiple ways to complete presentations.  Two of those I will showcase below.

PREZI!

Prezi - Prezi is a web-based software that you can use to create a presentation that will then be emailed, downloaded, embedded using Adobe Flash.  The neat thing about Prezi is that the entire presentation is viewable at the same time on the screen.  You can embed pictures as well into the Presentation.  It is gerat for those short lectures that you need to make for your students, and since it is something new you will catch their attention.  There are different backgrounds for you to choose from as well as a few different colors of text.  You can easily move the text, enlarge the text, or change the direction of the text.  Once you have provided all the information, it will then allow you to choose the path the presentation should follow. After more review, the best way to think about Prezi is a 3-D view of a slide presentation. Think of it as a 3-Dimensional Box.  Here is a link to a Prezi that shows some of the Tips and Tricks that you can do with a Prezi.  Just press the arrow and go through the Presentation.

Glogster - Think of a Blog, but think of it in Poster form.  Now take away the Blog thought and think about the ole $.50 Posterboard you make your students buy for a project and throw that out as well.  Time to think about having your students create a Glog.  Glogster for Education allows the teacher to set up a virtual class for their students.  It will generate Usernames and Passwords (Random letters and numbers) for you to give to your students.  You can then monitor your students work as they progress along on their Poster.

So what can Glogster for Education do?  Everything.  First you start with a blank slate.  Choose your background color or design.  You can then add graphics and text of any kind.  You can attach pictures, as well as embed video and audio.  You can even add links to outside webpages that will open in a new window as well.  One of the things I like about Glogster is that when you put in text that is longer than the area you are allowed to type in, it generates a scroll so that you can scroll through the information.

This would be a great way for students to complete presentations over anything.  All the normal Posterboard presentations could now be completed on a Glog.  I do advise that school teachers/systems make sure that the site is unblocked and that fonts are not blocked by your firewall.  That was the problem at our school.

Here is a Link to a Glog that I created showcasing what a Glog can do and look like. Glog Sample