How Can I Make My PowerPoint Presentations Amazing? The Truth About Snapchat: A Digital Literacy Lesson for Us All The idea of Snapchat is simple, delightfully so. Take an image or a video, send it to a friend or paramour. Ten seconds after the receiver opens the file, it self-destructs, and the sender can rest assured that no trace of the message remains. Signed, sealed, delivered, deleted. But that’s not quite true. Gary Price, author of the information industry blog INFOdocket , says Snapchat illustrates an important lesson in digital literacy: the Internet never forgets. “If you make something available on the Web, you can never be sure it will ever be 100 percent be gone, even if you work to remove it,” Price says. The problem, he says, is two-pronged. Second, providers of such services often shirk their responsibility for full and visible disclosure. Citing the motto of now-defunct clothing store Syms: “An educated consumer is our best customer,” Price says, “If you think about that in the Web age, I’m not sure that that’s really true.”
7 Steps to Giving a Killer PowerPoint Presentation Widely accepted as the most useful and accessible way to create visual aids ready to share with an audience, PowerPoint presentations are often poorly constructed making them boring and arduous to sit through. With so many uses and tools to help you give a fantastic presentation every time, it’s frustrating to see so many bad examples. Some sources claim that up to 50% of presentations are ineffective. A well-designed slideshow allows the presenter to maintain eye contact with the audience, creating an engaging experience for all involved. On the flip side, garish colour schemes, incorrect font sizes and poor image selection can turn your points from being clear to confusing. Here are our 7 best training tips for a better presentation. 1. Ok, so this one is obvious but you’ll be surprised how many people dive straight into creating a presentation without setting a plan and laying out the groundwork. Ask yourself what the key messages are that you want to get across to your audience. 2. 3.
5 Tools to Create a Collaborative Classroom 1 in Share Teachers often focus on tools such as blogs that allow their students to connect to the outside world. This is fantastic because it allows students to see how their learning connects to their ‘real’ lives and helps to bridge the gap between their school and home lives. In order to create a collaborative classroom environment, however, students need to know how to work with each other as well as with people from around the world. 1. Edmodo is the go-to tool for many educators. It is fantastic at teaching students to use social media effectively, and to connect students as a whole, and for any small group activities. 2. Celly is a fantastic tool for quick comments, questions and thoughts. 3. Wikis are quite an old tool now, and are rarely discussed in EdTech forums anymore. My students have used them in small groups when planning personalized inquiries, and as a class to build resources they could use for summative assessments. 4. 5. Get our free updates!
Organize your slides into sections - PowerPoint In this article: Overview of sections Have you ever gotten lost in a giant presentation when the slide titles and numbers start blurring together, and navigating through the presentation becomes impossible? You simply lose track of where you are! In Microsoft PowerPoint 2010, you can use the new Sections feature to organize your slides, much like you would use folders to organize your files. While you can view sections in either Slide Sorter view or Normal view, Slide Sorter view tends to be more helpful when you want to organize and sort your slides into logical categories that you have defined. Below is an example of how you can view sections in Normal view: And, below is an example of how you can view sections in Slide Sorter view: Shows the selected section in the slide deck Another section in the slide deck Top of Page Add and name a section In either Normal view or Slide Sorter view, right-click between the two slides where you want to add a section. Rename a section Remove a section
The packet-driven classroom Jeff Bliss got our attention when he shared his frustration with his teacher, classmates, and the world about his learning environment. The now viral video captures a room of students, some with their heads down, some with a facepalm, some staring into space, all silently sitting at their empty desks seemingly disconnected not only from each other, but also from their behind-a-desk-fortress teacher. That is until Jeff Bliss got up and spoke: Jeff Bliss: [I’m tired of] hearing this freakin’ lady go off on kids because they don’t get this crap. According to classmate Colleen Hunt, “Everyone at our school is proud of him for speaking his mind and not being rude about it.” I experienced this first hand. As I was leaving the school I happened to run into their teacher and commended her for doing such wonderful work. I looked around to make sure no one else was listening and whispered, “Why don’t you just keep teaching the way you teach and close your door?” We then realize that Ms.
PowerPoint 2013: See What's Coming with Presenter View | MS PowerPoint hints, tips, tutorials & discussion One of the most common questions in PowerPoint training is “how can I see something different on my screen to the audience?” The answer is complicated and involves multiple graphics card outputs. The Presenter View was added in 2010 but has really come into it’s own in PowerPoint 2013. In Presenter View you can see the current slide as well as the next slide and your notes on your monitor whilst the audience only sees the current slide. There’s a whole bunch of other tools underneath the main thumbnail, such as being able to zoom into slides to add emphasis, display a laser pointer to draw attention, and jump around the presentation without the delegates seeing what you’re doing. How to: The Presenter View will be used by default.
Storytelling Is Not Lecturing; Lecturing is Not Storytelling I sit in the lecture hall with 10,000 others waiting for my new teacher to speak. I look at my cell phone and silently groan that this in going to be a long hour; as long an hour as an hour can be as is typically the case when I listen to a lecture. She begins, “Let me tell you about Uncle Willie.” I take a deep breath of relief and settle in to hear her story. I came at the age of three to Grandma and my Uncle Willie in this little town in Arkansas. . . . I am a strong advocate against the use of lecturing for teaching which I discuss in detail in Who Would Choose a Lecture as Their Primary Mode of Learning? So what is it that makes stories such powerful teaching? Stories are different. Brain Activity: Lecture versus Storytelling It’s in fact quite simple. What follows is a graph of a student’s brain activity during a given week. So what happens to the brain when being told a story? Like this: Like Loading...
It Turns Out You Can Make Pretty Charts in Excel Whenever we make graphs using Excel, they turn out pretty ugly. But, actually Excel charts don't have to be ugly. While the default options provided by Excel are downright hideous, you can clean them up with a few tricks. Here's the before and after of the same chart. For those of you under the age of 15 that prefer seeing things in GIF format, here are some tips from Darkhorse Analytics that show the general process of making your charts look presentable. To get occasional notifications when we write blog posts, sign up for our email list.
Customer Service: Pour Some Sugar On Me - Hillsborough, NC School staff focus on curriculum alignment, differentiated instruction, professional development, college and career readiness, standards, and academic interventions. Is it possible that schools can lose their focus on customer service? Customers include families, community members, and all guests who visit the school website or schoolhouse. Customer service involves the front office staff, classroom teachers, teacher assistants, custodians, counselors, and all staff members. Six Ways To Pour Some Sugar On The Customer: Website The school website is the new front door. Customer Service Customer service involves phone skills, email etiquette, communication skills, and the way the customer is treated when they spend time at your school. Blog The media may promote your school once or twice a year. Coffee Hour Several schools host a Principal’s Coffee Hour once monthly. Twitter Twitter allows home-to-school and school-to-home communication. Next Steps Questions for School Staff to Consider
How to create a visualization Over the last few years I’ve created a few popular visualizations, a lot of duds, and I’ve learned a few lessons along the way. For my latest analysis of where Facebook users go on vacation, I decided to document the steps I follow to build my visualizations . It’s a very rough guide, these are just stages I’ve learned to follow by trial and error, but following these guidelines is a good way to start if you’re looking to create your first visualization. Play with your data I was lucky enough to spend a few hours with Andreas Weigend recently, head of the Stanford Social Data lab. In my case, we have a Cassandra cluster with information on more than 350 million photos shared on Facebook. Click to enlarge. I was chatting with my colleague Chris Raynor about this, and he asked me if we could tell where all the visitors to those places were coming from. When I was learning engineering, one of my favorite case studies was an investigation into an air-traffic control system. Pick a question
MOOC Mania: Debunking the hype around massive open online courses Illustration by Jacob Thomas In the fall of 2011, Stanford University offered three of its engineering courses—Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Introduction to Databases—for free online. Anyone with Internet access could sign up for them. As Sebastian Thrun, the director of Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, tells the story, he assumed just a handful of people would enroll in his graduate-level AI class. Instead, more than 160,000 students registered. That’s when the enormous hype began about massive open online courses, better known as “MOOCs.” Although it’s clear that there’s a flurry of interest in MOOCs among universities, higher-ed students, the tech industry, and pundits, these free online courses are also likely to have a significant impact on K–12 librarians and other educators. The price of popularity Still, the allure of a cost-free education is only part of MOOCs’ appeal. Is this rhetoric or reality? Take edX’s Circuits and Electronics class.
Slide Design for Developers So I gave this talk called How GitHub Uses GitHub to Build GitHub. Someone submitted my slides to Hacker News, where it stayed at #1 for most of the day. This was pretty strange to me at first. My slides are not designed for people who didn't see the talk in person. Working on your slide design pays off for the audience in front of you and for the audience online reading your slides later. Colors Color is the very first thing people will notice. Head to a color site like Colour Lovers and find a palette you like. Size Make your text huge. Most of my text in my entire deck is at least 90pt. For the curious, I use Yanone Kaffeesatz as the typeface for both my slide deck and the headings on my blog. One of my favorite tweets from my New Orleans talk said "Great slide design- I was way in the back and could read every single word!" Words as Shapes I took one design class in college. Slides give you the same opportunity. Repetition Humans love repetition. Steve Jobs did this often. Worry about it