Presentation Tools

When doing presentations, many people rely on PowerPoint or GoogleSlides, but in exploring the presentation tools in this week’s sandbox, I realized there were numerous other options out there that would be wonderful alternatives to those typical (and boring!) standbys.

Blendspace: Blendspace allows the user to combine all types of digital content, as well as their own files, to create an interactive, engaging, and multimedia presentation. Getting started with Blendspace is fairly easy. You simply need to type in your topic and the presentation tool will search Google, YouTube, and TES resources to help you find information you may want to include in your presentation. You also can add your own content files such as PDFs, Word Docs, links, images, videos, etc. Some content requires payment, but there is still a good variety of free content available to use in your Blendspace presentation. 

Emaze: Emaze is a web-based tool, and Chrome app, that allows users to create, save, and share presentations online. You can create a free account and access a bunch of animated templates and design options. The tool can give teachers the opportunity to take their presentations beyond what a standard PowerPoint can do with dynamic images, media, and charts and graphs. I liked that you can connect Emaze to your Instagram and/or Facebook accounts, so with the click of a button, all your personal photos are available to use in your presentations. 

Haiku Deck: Haiku Deck is a presentation-creating app that uses images and words to make more exciting presentations with "decks" of slides. Users are able to choose from pre-loaded themes, Creative Commons stock photographs, personal images, charts, graphs, and colors, and then add text to present information slide by slide, making it a more fun alternative to PowerPoint. In playing around on Haiku Deck, one thing I noticed is that there is very limited filtering of the Creative Commons images, so if you were using this in an educational setting with younger students, the teacher would need to be very careful in monitoring keyword searches.

Prezi: Prezi is an online presentation tool that, rather than being slide-based like PowerPoint, exists on a canvas. It uses motion, zoom, and spatial relationships to help bring a presentation to life. I am not super tech-savvy, but I like Prezi because it seems more user-friendly than other presentation platforms, and it adds more "pizzazz" than PowerPoint. Below is a Prezi that I created to use to supplement my syllabus at the beginning of the next school year. I will admit that it is boring and mainly text-based, but I am hoping the students like it and it makes things more interactive than me reading off a piece of paper.