week 6
Midterms are upon us. Been a real busy week. Apart from that the Flyers have won five of their first eight games for the first time since 2011-12 so it's been a great start so far.
This week we had a short week in class. We just discussed some presentation tools that can be beneficial to making your presentation more memorable and entertaining. We then used those tools to create a slideshow about what we are doing for Halloween. I watched The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown a few days ago so I am stoked for Halloween.
The reading this week was the third chapter of Untangling The Web. This chapter talks about presentation tools (I see what you did there) other than keynote and power point. One specific tool it talked about was Prezi. There are a couple things about it that I didn't know. One, if you are an educator you get a free premium membership to Prezi. This is really neat that they do this. It probably helps create a lot of brand awareness and certainly portrays them in a favorable light to educators. I also didn't know Prezi has it's own community called Prezi U. In it, educators can share ideas in order to inspire each other. That's a really neat resources for teachers to have. This resource along with Slide Share's community builds a strong net of resources for educators. Another tool discussed is Poll Everywhere. This one is my favorite. I really wish teachers would use this one more. I think polling questions to the class with anonymous answers is an awesome way to get students more engaged.
The first article this week can be found here. The article discusses Microsoft's new office tool, Sway. After reading the article I am still unclear what exactly it's for. The article describes it as being more for presenting ideas on screen rather than to an audience of people. This kind of makes sense to me, but I also think power point is just as capable. One perk with Sway is it does seem to look more fluid than power point does. Although I think Stu Robarts is right when he says, " [Sway is] not one that will be used quite as much as it's office siblings." However, both me and Stu could be wrong on this one.
The second article for the week can be found here. It discusses Prezi as a presentation tool. It goes over some pros and cons and gives tips to using your Prezi effectively in an academic environment. One of the cons I'd like to talk about is that Prezi can cause motion sickness if used incorrectly. I haven't had motion sickness, but I remember one particular instance when we had to make a Prezi in high school and present it to the class. After watching about two of them I pretty much had to put my head down for the rest of class. Not because of motion sickness, but I had a sharp pain in between my eyes when the presenter was zooming in and out. It was painful. Because of this I'm not too inclined to make another Prezi. One tip the article gives is that coherence matters. I think this is especially important in Prezi's. When you're zooming all over the screen it's important that you do so in a logical order. Otherwise the presentation kind of just looks like a mess.
The third and final article for this week can be found here. The article talks about a users experience with Haiku Deck. Something that I have personally never used before, but I remember you talking about it in class. The writer of the article makes me want to try it out for myself. It sounds like a very intuitive app. The one major thing stopping me though is that it is only available for ipad. I don't own an ipad and I feel like less and less people do as time goes on. Our phones are essentially taking the place of tablets and laptops are so cheap now there really isn't much reason to go out and buy one. I think if Haiku Deck wants to take their company to the next level they need to make it available on more platforms. I know if it was available for Windows I would give it a shot.
This week we had a short week in class. We just discussed some presentation tools that can be beneficial to making your presentation more memorable and entertaining. We then used those tools to create a slideshow about what we are doing for Halloween. I watched The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown a few days ago so I am stoked for Halloween.
The reading this week was the third chapter of Untangling The Web. This chapter talks about presentation tools (I see what you did there) other than keynote and power point. One specific tool it talked about was Prezi. There are a couple things about it that I didn't know. One, if you are an educator you get a free premium membership to Prezi. This is really neat that they do this. It probably helps create a lot of brand awareness and certainly portrays them in a favorable light to educators. I also didn't know Prezi has it's own community called Prezi U. In it, educators can share ideas in order to inspire each other. That's a really neat resources for teachers to have. This resource along with Slide Share's community builds a strong net of resources for educators. Another tool discussed is Poll Everywhere. This one is my favorite. I really wish teachers would use this one more. I think polling questions to the class with anonymous answers is an awesome way to get students more engaged.
The first article this week can be found here. The article discusses Microsoft's new office tool, Sway. After reading the article I am still unclear what exactly it's for. The article describes it as being more for presenting ideas on screen rather than to an audience of people. This kind of makes sense to me, but I also think power point is just as capable. One perk with Sway is it does seem to look more fluid than power point does. Although I think Stu Robarts is right when he says, " [Sway is] not one that will be used quite as much as it's office siblings." However, both me and Stu could be wrong on this one.
The second article for the week can be found here. It discusses Prezi as a presentation tool. It goes over some pros and cons and gives tips to using your Prezi effectively in an academic environment. One of the cons I'd like to talk about is that Prezi can cause motion sickness if used incorrectly. I haven't had motion sickness, but I remember one particular instance when we had to make a Prezi in high school and present it to the class. After watching about two of them I pretty much had to put my head down for the rest of class. Not because of motion sickness, but I had a sharp pain in between my eyes when the presenter was zooming in and out. It was painful. Because of this I'm not too inclined to make another Prezi. One tip the article gives is that coherence matters. I think this is especially important in Prezi's. When you're zooming all over the screen it's important that you do so in a logical order. Otherwise the presentation kind of just looks like a mess.
The third and final article for this week can be found here. The article talks about a users experience with Haiku Deck. Something that I have personally never used before, but I remember you talking about it in class. The writer of the article makes me want to try it out for myself. It sounds like a very intuitive app. The one major thing stopping me though is that it is only available for ipad. I don't own an ipad and I feel like less and less people do as time goes on. Our phones are essentially taking the place of tablets and laptops are so cheap now there really isn't much reason to go out and buy one. I think if Haiku Deck wants to take their company to the next level they need to make it available on more platforms. I know if it was available for Windows I would give it a shot.
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