After attending the conference and the workshop presented by Aylssa Taft and Sam Simas titled, “Making Presentations Pop with tech 2.0”, in a nutshell, here are the programs and apps I liked the best and thought were the easiest to use right away in the library and/or classroom. I shared with a few co-workers and some of my classes of students to jazz up the same old power point type projects!
“Slides Carnival” – A collection of professional – looking FREE presentation templates for Google slides or Power Point. The site says: “These designs cover all styles from playful and creative to formal and business presentations, and all templates are easy-to-edit… and keep the audience engaged. Use them freely for your own presentation needs, work right away in Google Slides or download the templates as a PowerPoint PPT file and continue working on your computer.” Each template contains around 25 different slides, all with beautiful images, backgrounds and icons, instructions, inspiration and ideas on how to use and adapt them. There are a lot of ways to make power points look more professional and updated. All they ask is you give them credit.
“Canva” – This is a graphic design website with FREE easy to use templates and tools for jazzing up your presentations. According to the site, Canva is “everything you need for amazing design”. The site features millions of images, hundreds of fonts, a multitude of photo filters, and free icons and shapes to add to your designs. It also features the capability to upload your own photos and graphics into the presentations. Another easy to make power points look even better!
“Screencastify” – This is an extension in the Chrome suite for capturing and recording your screen and displaying it for others to see. It is a great tool for teacher to student or student to student or student to teacher demonstrations (especially virtual lessons and flipped classroom.) I demonstrated it to a few co-workers and one of the 5th grade teachers has taken it and ran!