Presentation Tools   

Presentation tools in the classroom are important for teachers and students.  They are powerful tools for anyone wanting to show something on the IWB, computer or other device. The ones listed below are the tools I use most often, each having their own advantages and disadvantages, but are all easy to use.  I did a "Like" and "Dislike" list for Prezi only and you can make up your own mind on the others.


Prezi     My Prezis

For a variation of how to present a slide show, Prezi is a good option.  You can import Powerpoints into Prezi but will need to reformat once in Prezi.  Here are my likes and dislikes about Prezi.

Likes

• web based, so you can easily access your Prezis, if there's a wireless connection
• you can also view off-line, just need to make sure to save it for offline function
• sharing via different ways, such as email and online
• able to embed Prezis into your web page, grab the html and insert once you have turned on the html version of your web page or blog.  Embedding is not that hard, but you may need to practice a few times to get it right.
• you can make it private or public or share with those with a link
• presentation transitions are unique, watch your vertigo!
• new slides and changing of sequencing of slides is relatively easy.
• inserting images is easy.
• sub-slides are a very handy tool, sort of a footnote or smaller slide that goes to full screen size once engaged.
• automatically saves every few minutes
• it's free!
• Prezi can be used on most devices, but some are more limited in functions than others

Dislikes (not many)

• not many, but the fact that Prezi does not hyperlink to text or images is annoying, you need to paste the whole link in TIP: shorten the link in Google or bitly or tinyurl

Emaze

Emaze is a very good web presentation program, it has a free version which will probably satisfy most of us.  It has a decent range of functions and has the ability to import Powerpoint presentations, which is what I did for this one.  


 Google Slides

Like all Google products, Slides is very good.  Obviously dovetails wonderfully with Blogger and if you are a Google fan with Blogger and sites, this is probably your go to presentation app. The great thing about Google apps is that they are so versatile.  You can have your students or colleagues contribute to a shared slide, you can download them into several formats, including PowerPoint, and the many features of Google Slides makes it a great addition to this list of presentation tools.  Here is one that I created to introduce new language content and revise work for my Year 7 class.  The last few slides were left over from the template I chose for Google Slides. I have timed the slides to change every 10 seconds on this blog post or you can press the arrow to forward it. 

                     


Slideshare

Slideshare arguably houses the most amount of free, publically available slide presentations online.  Whatever topic you are after, it has probably been saved and shared in Slideshare.  You can create slide presentations in Slideshare on your computer, but not on mobile devices.  



 Keynote

A great app that almost holds its own with Microsoft's Powerpoint.  Keynote is user friendly and the presentation can be controlled with your iPhone which is useful.  Available for you Mac or iOS device but not online.



Powerpoint

Probably the benchmark for all presentation slide software.  Powerpoint is a favourite of mine and I imagine like many others, slide presentation skills were honed with PPT.  It is a powerful tool that can do it all, except its not a cloud based product, but that is not really a huge disadvantage except if you want to edit online.  You can always save it in your Google Drive   though and access it that way offline.