Presentation - websites

As Christmas time approaches, I decided this year that I would like to give our Year 6 children the opportunity to greater develop their capability in applying custom animation tools by letting them learn how to use them effectively to make clip art characters/pictures move around the screen to tell a story - the idea being that these lessons would balance out against the more serious information slideshows I'm intending to ask them to create later on in the year  

A few weeks ago I blogged about teaching Year 6 how to use the custom animation tools inPowerPoint to create mini scenes with moving characters on them - click here to read.

Since then, in the following lessons, I set the children the challenge of creating a short sequence of animated scenes to retell the nativity story. By letting them work quite independently on this task, it would mean that the lessons would be differentiated by outcome (i.e. the more confident children would have the chance to combine a range of effects to play in sequence whilst the less confident children would have the chance to practice inserting simple effects that animate 'on mouse click') and that things could be a little more flexible with regards to children missing parts of lessons to go off and rehearse for/help out at various Christmas things going on in school.

Website - MS slidefest:  

Website - best sources of advice for making good presentations:  

Website - how to give a lousy presentation:   

Watch these poorly executed PowerPoint presentations for examples of what not to do.

Helping our students learn how to deliver good presentations, and helping ourselves practice what we preach, is always a challenging exercise (at least, it is for me). I thought it might be useful to create a “The Best…” list with the resources that I’ve found useful for doing both.

Understanding how to create an effective presentation is an important ICT skill for children to learn. Although there is now a wide variety of presentation-making software out there for them to use, 

I do still think that it's worthwhile (if not necessary) to still spend some time teaching them how to use the 'daddy' of them all - Microsoft PowerPoint - properly.

In recent years, PowerPoint has come under much criticism for aiding the production of long, boring presentations containing slide after slide of bullet-pointed statements. Many people fail to see the true capabilities of the program however and thus limit their work to using just the very basic tools.  PowerPoint becomes PowerPointless!

I thought I'd have a go this year at teaching children in Year 5 how to make printable posters inPowerPoint themselves. Now, this might not seem pretty original but I do think there's some value in showing the children how to properly position and align different elements so that they look attractive on the page rather cluttered.

The simple process which I demonstrate to them as they follow along is:

I blogged a few weeks ago about how I teach Year 2 to create multimedia story books using 2Create a Superstory - see here.

With our Year 1/2 class (the next one down) I do a similar series of lessons but with a few tweaks to make it slightly simpler for them:

• the storyline is different and less complicated;
• they use the 'normal' template;
• the animation sequences are shorter.

Creating photo collages using ICT can be useful for showcasing a selection of pictures alongside each other and for creating fancy backgrounds (e.g. for a desktop wallpaper or a slideshow margin).

I regularly use a program called Shape Collage to create collages of photos to put onto the school website and have used it occasionally in lessons too (see this example from a few months ago). Upon reflection though, whilst I find it easy to use to quickly generate a collage, the children seem to find it a little bit too fiddly to work with because there are lots of options and the interface isn't particularly 'intuitive'.