Skip to main content

Presentations

The PowerPoint presentation has become a standard for sleep-inducing high tech shows where one person reads text off a screen out loud to another group who sits and reads the same text silently. It doesn't have to be that way...

Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds is a great website for ideas about presentations. One of the best entries is What is Good PowerPoint Design? I also like the coverage of different presentation methods, particularly the Lessig method, but also the Kawasaki method.

Another site devoted to presentations is Sociable Media by Cliff Atkinson, the author of Beyond Bullet Points. Check out the articles section for some good ideas about learning and presentations. In particular, the article with Richard Mayer -- Five Ways to Reduce PowerPoint overload (PDF) should be required reading for anyone thinking about creating a PowerPoint presentation.


If you've got a PowerPoint presentation lacking images, check out Stock Xchng, a free stock photo site.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Blackboard Podcasts

I've been searching for podcasts about Blackboard and have come across a few. Some are too site-specific while others could use a little more polish before I would recommend them to others. However, one podcast I did find to be useful and high quality is Teaching with Blackboard by Jason Rhode at Northern Illinois University. Episode 5, posted last week, discusses how to incorporate RSS feeds into Blackboard using Feed2JS , a website and tool for converting an RSS feed to JavaScript which can be copied and pasted into your Blackboard course. This gives you a relatively easy way to add dynamic content to a course. For many instructors, RSS may be a foreign language, but I think if you listen to the five minute podcast, you will learn enough to get the idea. If you want more, Jason's previous podcast covers RSS and podcasting in more detail.

QuickSource Guides to Blackboard

The Resource Network in Harrisonburg, Virginia, publishes fold out guides to various software applications like MS Office, WordPerfect, Adobe Acrobat and more. They have student and instructor guides to BlackBoard for $4.00 each. Prices are lower if you buy in bulk. I got mine yesterday and they look nice and are easy to read. Each one covers the important things you need to know to use Blackboard as a student or instructor. They are also available through Amazon.com for $4.95 each.

Avoiding lost work in Moodle

When students are working in our installation of Moodle, there are some common ways that their work can be lost. Because Moodle doesn't save what you've written until you click Save (assignments) or Post to Forum in Forums, anything that interrupts your connection to Moodle can lead to lost work and frustration. Interruptions include computer problems or network outages or disconnections. If you are writing anything longer than a paragraph,  it's a good idea to use a text editor to do your writing and then copy and paste into Moodle so no matter what happens, you won't lose any of your work. If you combine your use of a text editor with an online backup plan, you'll have a secure backup of all of your work even after the class ends and you can no longer access it (see below). You could use a word processor like Microsoft Word, but you may need to save your work as plain text first to avoid seeing formatting errors when you copy and paste from Word into Moodle. A