Monday, June 1, 2015

Create interactive and "awesome" presentations!

With so many new and creative web tools out there, I thought I would mention a couple alternatives to consider for presentations. Both of these tools can be used by teachers and students.

Pear Deck is an interactive presentation tool that works within Google Apps. Pear Deck lets students interact with teacher created presentation content using any device that runs Chrome, Firefox or Safari. Questions can range from multiple choice to open ended. So this tool works well as a formative assessment, discussion starter, and more. Currently Pear Deck has a 5 slide limit for the free account*. So it can be used to supplement existing presentations. Or current, shorter presentations can be converted into Pear Deck files.

The Pear Deck Support page explains how to get started along with examples of how it's being used in different subject areas.

Below is a video that shows how Pear Deck works. 


*Nearpod is similar to Pear Deck. Nearpod limits by presentation size rather than number of slides. So longer presentations are possible.


PowToon lets you easily create animated presentations and videos. This tool is an interesting alternative to using PowerPoint, Google Slides or Prezi. 

PowToon offers video tutorials and additional support on their website. It can be used to create introductions to units, instructions for a project or flipping your classroom to name a few examples. 

Below is an introduction to the "awesomeness" of PowToon (created using PowToon). 



As always, these web tools can be found on the RHS media center page on the Web Tools tab under "Present".