Use Storytelling in Your Presentations

Great slideshare from Claudio Perrone on creating compelling presentations using storytelling.

SlideShare Blog:

Do your presentations tell a story? No matter what your message is, there’s a story behind it – and this applies to more than just case studies. You could tell the story of you – how did you get where you are? Or the story of your company – what led your company or organization to define a vision and decide where to start?

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But what about those of us who are not skilled at storytelling and don’t know where to start? Claudio Perrone provides a step-by-step process for creating a presentation that delivers your message in the form of a story. Claudio also tells his own story about conquering his fear of public speaking.

Crafting Outstanding Presentations - Storytelling Techniques

View more presentations from Claudio Perrone.

Jing Things

TechSmith, the company behind Jing, recently added some new features that make the tool even more appealing. Both Jing (free) and Jing Pro ($14.95/year) captures can be posted to Facebook walls. Jing Pro users can now remove the Jing branding from screencast.com viewing pages.

See these new features in action by viewing the interactive simulation on the Jing web site.

Turning Our Slides into a Video Using Animoto

Animoto is a free tool that allows you to transform images and video clips into engaging videos complete with background music. Educators can apply for special animoto accounts that enable free access (for you and your students) to longer video formats and more features. We used animoto to transform our "after" slides. After watching the video, imagine other uses, including students presentations or digital compositions, videos promoting your college, department, program, or an event, or even a digital newsletter highlighting a recent meeting, event, or open house.



So, how did we do this? Even though it looks complicated and time-intensive, it's actually fast, fun, and easy. First we saved each slide in our PowerPoint presentation as a .jpg image file. The following Jing video shows how to do this:



Next, we logged in to our animoto educator account and made a video. The following Jing video shows how:


Once animoto renders the video, you will receive an e-mail, to the address used to set up your account, with a link to the video. You can share the video using e-mail, embed, or other options available by logging in to animoto.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

Passion in Teaching

In a post about the recent death of Jaime Escalante - the math teacher who was the subject of the 1988 film 'Stand and Deliver' - Steven W. Anderson posts this really great word cloud. Great image for any teacher!

Enduring Passion...

Great Infographic on Water

Discuss: Drinkable water in the world

Creating Interesting Slides

Let's start with a quick recap. We began our discussion with Finding Interesting Slides for Your Courses. The following week, we posed our 10 Questions to Ponder, and then used those questions in Finding Photos for Your Slides. Now we'll combine those images and the questions to create an engaging (hopefully) slideshow. For our purposes, we'll be using PowerPoint 2007 and free screen-shot tool Jing.

We start by inserting our downloaded images into PPT as individual slides - here's what that looks like in Slideshare - our "before" slides:

Creating Great Slides - Before

View more presentations from mqaissaunee.

Here Kelly takes us through editing the slides for the first five questions.

Question 1: How do we support the changing role of teacher?




Question 2: What is the role of the teacher?



Question 3: How do we help students discover their passions?


Question 4: What is the essential learning that schools impart to students?



Question 5: What is the purpose of school?


Mike continues with the remaining questions:

Question 6: How do we adapt our curriculum to the technologies that kids are already using?


Question 6: How do we adapt our curriculum to the technologies that kids are already using? (cont'd)


Bonus Question: Do we risk kids becoming addicted to technology?


Bonus Question: Do we risk kids becoming addicted to technology?(cont'd)


Question 7: What does an educated person look like today?


Question 8: How do we change policy to support more flexible time and place learning?


Question 9: What are the essential practices of teachers in a system where students are learning outside of school?


Question 10: How do we ensure those without privilege have equal access to quality education and opportunity?


Finally, here are the "after" slides:

Creating Great Slides - After

View more presentations from mqaissaunee.

Edward Tufte, Powerpoint, and Dead Kittens

We've talked about PowerPoint, Death by Powerpoint, and Professor Edward Tufte. Before we post our final set of PowerPoint slides for our 10 questions to ponder, here's a very timely (and funny) graphic that brings it all together.

via Mark Goetz via FlowingData via dataviz