Top 5 presentation tools for teachers and learners

PowerPoint. It is much maligned and certainly has its place in the education world. Even advances with Apple’s Keynote with Keynote in the cloud are a step forward, however, I would argue that we as educators should seek to set a higher bar on the way we present materials. Subjects and even schools can be branded to create a unified and streamlined sense of belonging for the learners, however this can take time and cost a lot of money. In the short term, there is a lot you can do as a classroom teacher to make presentations more engaging, and here are 5 tools to allow you to make inspiring materials. Remember, where you lead, students will follow, so this might be the start of getting a higher standard for presentations in your class.

1 – Haiku Deck – This is available as an app and now as a web tool. It creates beautiful clean and word minimal presentations. Brilliant as it uses creative commons images, and also as students can’t just read off slides.

Created with Haiku Deck, the free presentation app

2 – PowToon – This is a lovely little animation style presentation tool, which really helps to engage learners in creating a whole presentation, not just about creating words on a slide. It also allows a lot of creativity in how the presentation will look, so children can really take ownership of their work.

3 – Slid.es – In many ways this is similar to PowerPoint, but has a very polished professional look. The templates are easy to use, and even younger learners will be able to achieve a high level of work. Good for building confidence, and developing literacy skills.

4 – Presentation in G drive. The key to the power of this tool is in its ability to allow children to collaborate. You can allot one slide per child and have them working on their own topic, but allow them to peer assess each others work with FiSH (Friendly, Specific and helpful) comments. This is true collaborative working facilitated by a digital tool.

5 – VideoScribe – This tool is an app, which can be a bit tricky to get the hang out, but provides as unique feel to a presentation, which allows allows you to choose background music, and for learners to do a voice over. I have done some work on AppSmashing (using more than one app to produce creative results) and this is a great one for that as you can import  the product from the camera roll into iMovie to produce a more polished result along with other assets you might want to include.

There you go, 5 tools to help polish your presentations. Of course I could have included good old Prezi, but who doesn’t know about that? Do you have any more favourites, I would love to hear about them.

Photo Credit: mattcornock via Compfight cc