Presentations

Inanimate Alice Presentation from BETT

Posted on Jan 15, 2012 in Interactive Whiteboards, Literacy Resources, Other Subjects, Presentations, Promethean, Useful Links | 2 comments

Here’s a copy of my Inanimate Alice presentation from the BETT show on Friday as part of TeachMeet Takeover. Thanks to all those who came to watch, and thanks to Promethean for letting me have some time on their stand.

English and MFL teachers should definitely check out the Inanimate Alice resource – it’s free so go take a look!

The presentation was videoed too, you can see it on YouTube here.

Now Let’s Write It Up : A Teachmeet Presentation

Posted on Oct 13, 2011 in Conferences, Interactive Whiteboards, Presentations, Useful Links, Web Tools | 0 comments

Here’s a copy of a presentation I produced for TeachMeet Brighton and Teachmeet Moray House (TMMH11) as well as being shown at TeachMeet Dorset.

The theme was to demonstrate several alternatives to the Science write up (which are also applicable to other subjects too). Do we always have to go away and write it up in the usual manner – method, results, conclusion etc. Sometimes there’s a place for showing what you know in a different format – try telling the story digitally.

There are many ways to do this, in this presentation I show just a couple that you might find interesting.

The links to the sites/software demonstrated are :

• Go Animate
• Xtranormal
• Toonlet
• MonkeyJam
• JellyCam
• Zu3d

Hope you liked the presentation – and if your students make any cool videos using these tools, please let me know!

Feel free to use at other TeachMeet events if you want to – just let me know if you do.

Photo Credit : Writing in the Journal by redcargurl

Spice up Powerpoints with Mouse Mischief

Posted on Jul 18, 2011 in Activity Ideas, Interactive Whiteboards, Presentations, Useful Links | 5 comments

Mouse Mischief is a free plug in for PowerPoint 2007/2010 which lets you create quizzes and polls which the class can interact with via wireless mice.

Once installed, a new toolbar appears which lets you add different types of question to your PowerPoint presentation. Students can interact with these via wireless mice.

You can buy wireless mice quite cheaply (£10 or less) and get a powered USB hub for about £15. You can even chain several USB hubs together if you wanted every student to have access to a mouse. Alternatively students could do this in groups, with one mouse per team.

When you run the show, you designate one mouse as the teachers mouse. This lets you control the show. Until the show is run, any mouse can control the screen – so there is a risk of your computer being hijacked by a classful of mice! You might wish to not give out the mice until the show is running – or unplug the USB hub until you’re ready to start!

Mouse Mischief provides a lower cost solution to class polling than a full class set of voting handsets, although with more limited uses. The Microsoft site contains lesson ideas, downloadable presentations, and links to support resources and videos.

Download Mouse Mischief now and take a look.

Essential Digital Resources for your IWB (2011)

Posted on Mar 21, 2011 in Conferences, Interactive Whiteboards, Presentations, Resources, Tutorials and Guides | 0 comments

Here’s an online version of the Essential Digital Resources presentation that I gave at last week’s Teacher2Teacher conference in Canada. This is a longer version of the presentation I gave at TeachMeet Takeover in January.

All the links in the presentation can be found at : http://delicious.com/dannynic/essentialmedia

Delegates who attended the conference can download the original version from the Prairie Rose School Board files area.

Capzles – digital storytelling and presentation tool

Posted on Feb 21, 2011 in Interactive Whiteboards, Presentations, Useful Links, Web Tools | 1 comment

Capzles is an interesting digital storytelling tool that allows users to tell a story using pictures, video clips, audio tracks and text. Users are given the ability to place this media, called “moments”, together chronologically in a timeline.

Creating a “Capzle” is easy via the website. You can upload photographs and videos or blog directly onto the site. You have a lot of control over the background colors and themes to be used with the capzle. Users can also add an audio track to be played in the background as their capzle is viewed.

There is also a Capzle iPhone app which lets you upload images from your phone straight into a Capzle.

I had a quick play with the site and produced a short test capzle : View my Test Capzle Here

Adding video is tricky in that you cannot just import files from YouTube. You need to upload video files. Maybe in the future this feature will be added. This does limit it’s use as a way of collating resources that students have found online on a given topic.

The terms of the Capzle website state that under 13s cannot register, so this is something to use with children above that age. There are social network aspects to the site so it’s best to restrict it to older children.

For educational use, this is another tool which could be used to produce simple presentations – collating images, videos and text into one presentation document. Pupils could produce Capzles on particular topics in the same way they might produce a powerpoint or prezi presentation.

Capzles looks like an interesting tool – and it’s worth bookmarking as another online presentation solution.

8 Great Online Presentation Tools

Posted on Feb 7, 2011 in Activity Ideas, Digital Media, Presentations, Useful Links | 0 comments

Here are 8 alternatives to giving a presentation with PowerPoint. As well as standard presentations, some of these tools create slideshows from sets of images. They are all free, or at least have a free option.

Prezi

Prezi lets you create very engaging presentations that pan and zoom from page to page. You can create non-linear presentations quite easily. Prezi lets you embed images and video too. You can view the presentations that you have created online, and also download them in a Flash player format to play offline. Here’s some ideas on how to use Prezi.

Here’s a Prezi I produced to introduce the Science course on the PGCE orientation day.

PhotoPeach

With PhotoPeach you can create a rich slideshow in seconds. It also allows background music, captions, and comments so you can elaborate on your story further. It’s quick and easy to use. It doesn’t have a lot of fancy effects, but for a simple slideshow it’s worth considering.

Animoto

Animoto lets you create photo slideshows and put them to music. A wide range of creative commons music is available. Short videos can be produced for free, longer ones require a small payment. There is an educational version available.

It’s very simple to produce cool-looking presentations quickly, like this:

Zoho Show

Zoho Show allows you to create presentations from scratch or upload existing ones created in PowerPoint. Zoho Show also allows you to export your slide shows into a variety of formats, including HTML, PowerPoint and .pdf. Zoho Show is part of a much bigger suite of online applications that you might also find interesting.

Empressr

Empressr is a free online storytelling tool that allows you to create, manage and share rich media presentations online. Upload your video, images and audio to get started creating cool slideshows. If you have your own website, blog, or social networking page, you can either post a link or embed your Empressr. Empressr also has charting and table tools.

Image Loop

A very simple free tool for taking photographs and turning them into a slideshow. You get some customisation options, but they are a little limited. Finished slideshow can then be embedded into your blog, wiki or VLE.

Google Docs

Google Docs has a pretty useful presentation tool. You can create a presentation from scratch or upload a PowerPoint. The strength of the Google presentation tool is that many users can collaborate on a single presentation. The best examples of this are the “Ideas to Inspire” presentations sparked off by Tom Barrett. Each presentation is the combined efforts of many different teachers from all over the world.

Slideshare

Slideshare lets you share your presentation easily with students after the lesson, and also lets you embed your presentation into a blog/wiki or the school VLE. It’s slightly different to some of the others in that you start with a Powerpoint presentation and then upload it to Slideshare.

Local Software

As well as these online options, it’s also worth considering using the free software already installed on your computers such as Movie Maker or PhotoStory which will both produce your own photo slideshows without having to be tied to an online connection.

And remember, presentations don’t have to be like this:

TeachMeet Takeover Talk pt1

Posted on Jan 14, 2011 in Conferences, Digital Media, Interactive Whiteboards, Presentations | 0 comments

Thanks to Kevin Mulryne for filming the first part of my TeachMeet Takeover talk at BETT 2011 yesterday.

The theme of the talk was – Essential Digital Media for your Interactive Whiteboard. The full list of links I mentioned (and a few that were left out because of time) can be found here: http://www.delicious.com/dannynic/essentialmedia

The whole presentation was filmed by Sarah at Iris Connect (thanks again for the use of your stand) so hopefully I’ll be able to post that here when it’s uploaded after the show.

Screencasting with IWB Software

Posted on Dec 6, 2010 in Activity Ideas, Interactive Whiteboards, Presentations, Promethean, SMARTboards, Tutorials and Guides | 2 comments

If you have a Smartboard or a Promethean board then you already have the software to allow you to make screencasts. A screencast is a way of capturing everything that you do on a computer screen with audio narration, and save it as a movie file to share later.

By using this technique you could run through a presentation and capture it with your own voice over the top. It could allow teachers to record parts of a lesson, or to create revision guides. If coupled with the interactive whiteboard it would also record all your handwritten annotations as well. You’d need a longer microphone lead, or you could plug a USB microphone into the USB port on some newer smartboard models.

Even better, you could get pupils to create their own screencasts to demonstrate what they know.

I used the Smart Recorder bundled with Smart Notebook to record my lesson starters talk the other week.

Here’s an example of a screencast produced by a teacher to demonstrate mathematic principles, it comes from the Mathademics YouTube Channel:

In Smart Notebook

Look for the small blue/white Smart Notebook Icon in your system tray, or look in Start -> Programs -> Smart Technologies -> Smart Notebook -> Smart Recorder (or similar path)

The Smart Recorder tool will open and look like this:

By clicking on the narrow button next to the record button you can choose whether to record the whole desktop,  a chosen area or a chosen window, depending on what you want to demonstrate.

Hitting the record button will start the recording. Hit the stop button when done and it will ask you for a filename and save the file. Still need help? Here’s a guide I found.

In Promethean ActivInspire

From the Promethean Toolbar click on Desktop tools.

This will minimize the ActivInspire software and leave the small floating tools icon. Click on this to open it up and select the screen recorder tools. Again you can choose whether to record the whole screen or a chosen area.

What to screencast?

Using the screen recorder tool, pupils could:

• Make audio stories – move clipart characters on the “stage” of an IWB page to tell a story.
• Explain how they carried out a particular piece of work
• Make revision guides
• Produce instructional guides
• Make a tourist guide to their area combined with Google Maps / Street View
• Role play in a foreign language

and much more.

In both cases the recorded screencast can be used as-is, or could be edited in video editing software such as Movie Maker to add other elements before being published. Upload to YouTube to share with the world, or put onto the school Learning Platform / VLE to share with a smaller audience.

There are other pieces of software out there that will do screencasting, but if you already have one of these two boards you should already have something on your computer which, for free, will do the same job!

Enjoy!

Essential Digital Resources for your IWB

Posted on Apr 6, 2010 in Digital Media, Interactive Whiteboards, Presentations, Tutorials and Guides | 1 comment

One of the talks I gave at the Teacher2Teacher conference was on finding useful digital content to use on your Interactive Whiteboard. There’s more to the Internet than YouTube and Google Image search!

Although this presentation was delivered mainly to Smartboard users, and the original presentation produced in Smart Notebook format, the information is very useful to any IWB users. Or even teachers who have a projector and no board.

So I have uploaded the presentation to Slideshare if you would like to take a look.

All of the links from the session can be found here : http://delicious.com/dannynic/t2t. The links in the presentation don’t work I’m afraid…. long story.

One thing that is worth mentioning is that if you now do a Google Image search you can click on Advanced Search to bring up more options. You can then specify what Usage Rights you want – so basically searching for Creative Commons images.

I also like the fact that in the basic Google Image Search you can now also specify the colour of the image you want. So you can narrow down your search for a Flower to yellow flowers, or red flowers. Don’t just search for Elephant – look for Pink Elephants!

Try it out, it’s very cool. Click on the coloured boxes to the left of your image search to change colour.