Free Online Presentation Tools for Students

by

Nothing can be more useful for a student than free online presentation tools. These are the best online presentation tools that are devoid of cost and can be used wherever you are with just your smart phone or laptop.

TOOLS & EXAMPLES

Some of the more popular tools with examples and ideas that can be used at a variety of grade levels and for a range of purposes.

Presentation Tools

  • Buncee – A fun tool for creating a single ‘slide’ or many. Lots of colorful backgrounds, images and animations to choose from. Add your own graphics, audio, embed videos, add text and more. Free and fee plans, classroom options as well. Use it for student presentations, flipped classroom content, storytelling and more.
  • Google Slides – Easy to use, integrated with other Google tools. If you’re a Google G Suite school, this is a no-brainer!
  • Beautiful.AI – Free online presentation builder. Great user interface with lots of preformatted slide templates for graphs, timelines, different text and image layouts, and more. Themes provide color and typeface design. Export to PDF or PPT format for offline presentation. This looks like a terrific tool. Hope they maintain a free option as they grow.
  • HaikuDeck – Web and app presentation tool. Makes beautifully simple and effective presentation slides.  Enter text and Haiku Deck presents images that  might relate to your text. Use those images or add your own to create your presentation.  Free account only allows for 1 public slide deck. Education discount of $99 allows for classroom of 150 students.  Example: Telling Stories
  • Prezi – An interesting way of creating a presentation in a somewhat non-linear way. Place text, photos, and other media on a big blank screen. Arrange in the order you want to present it and add paths to connect all the pieces. Lets you zoom in and out to put focus on different pieces of the presentation. Could be used as a mind-mapping tool. Limited free account for educators. Example (with great tips!) :  How to stop your Prezi making people feel sick!

Record Your Presentation Slides with Audio

  • Screencastomatic – Free, web-based tool that records what is on your screen, while you narrate. Set up your slides in PowerPoint or another tool, launch the recording tool and go. You’ll end up with a video of your presentation with your audio narration.
  • Knovio – Upload your slides, then narrate slide by slide. Limited free plan.
  • PowerPoint also offers slide recording and narration.
  • iPad screen recording – With iOS 11 or later, you can create a screen recording and capture sound on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. How to create a presentation? Create slides in Google Slides, put them in presentation mode. Then turn on screen recorder and talk while you swipe through your slides.Video with audio is saved to you iPad photostream. Then upload to YouTube for sharing.

Visual Storytelling – Photos, Text & More

  • Adobe Spark –  This has grown into an amazing tool. Definitely one to explore. Free and premium accounts. Web-based and iOS options. Note that Spark replaces and incorporates earlier services: Slate, Post and Voice.
    • Create an image with words and photos – a poster, a quote, an advertisment, etc.
    • Create a web page with images, video, text, links to other sites (using the “button” option) and more – use this to tell a story, create a timeline, present research process and results and more.
    • Create a video with images, text, video clips, add music and voiceovers.  Adobe Spark for Education was designed with educators in mind. Read more about this from Monica Burns, an educator and huge fan of Spark. She has lots of great tips on her site.
    • Examples:
      • BGS Teacher Talk – A newsletter created with Adobe Spark by @bgsteachbetter
      • The Garden – My test of Spark. Easy to search for photos within the tool and it automatically credits the photos at the end
      • Example video created during a teacher workshop.
  • Microsoft Sway – Microsoft’s entry into the digital publishing/visual storytelling realm. “Create and share interactive reports, presentations, personal stories, and more.” Lots of options, a little bit daunting at first. Start from scratch or import from PowerPoint, Word or PDF. Create on the Web, Windows 10 and iOS. Probably not for elementary school students.
  • Sutori – (Formerly called Hstry) Free and Premium plans. Create a web page with images and text. Format is perfect for a timeline presentation, but can be used for anything that needs to be presented sequentially. Teachers can add students via Google Classroom or through a classroom code. Even with the free plan, there’s a nice interface for managing your students and viewing their work. Students join with their own email addresses and then use the code to join your classroom. Students can collaborate on stories and teachers can leave feedback on the stories. Includes a great collection of ideas for using Sutori in different subject areas. With the $100/year Unlimited plan you can add video, audio, quizzes and more. 30 day free trial of Unlimited plan. If you love the tool, you can apply to be a Sutori Storyteller and get a year’s free trial.
  • Exposure, Steller – These tools provide templates and design options to help you easily create beautifully laid out stories with photos and text.
    Use these for student presentations, creative writing, photo stories, newsletters and more.
    • Exposure – web-based only, with 3 free stories.
    • Steller – iOS and Android. No web interface.

Tools, tips and Resources

MEDIA RESOURCES

Finding Media: Searching for photos and music can take a lot of work, especially if you’re preparing an important presentation and are looking for just the right image to convey your message. Listed below are some tools to help you find media for presentations. The best way to find photos you can legally reuse, is to search for Creative Commons licensed images. Some image search tools have a way to limit your search to CC licensed content.

  • IMPORTANT: Check for licensing terms of any photo you download. You’ll need to keep track of where you got the photo to give it proper credit.

Creative Commons Images and Sound

  • LibreStock – a meta search engine for 47 sites that have Creative Commons 0  licensed images. (that means you can do anything you want with the images!)
  • Pixabay – My first stop for photo searching. All images are CC0 licensed, free to use.
  • Pexels and Unsplash – Two more CCO image sources
  • Photos for Class – Age appropriate images, Creative Commons. And so handy, the downloaded images include the citation.
  • CC search – search for images, video and music from one search page. Handy!
  • Creative Commons Edshelf – Image, music and video sources.
  • NYPL Public Domain Collection – Over 180,000 digitized items now in the public domain. Great resource!
  • Sample Focus – Easy to search for sound files.

LEARNING ACTIVITY

This learning activity is easy, fun and very flexible!

  • Step 1: Pick a tool, any tool (it doesn’t have to be listed in this lesson) and create a short presentation of some sort.
  • Step 2: Write a blog post about the tools you explored; how you might use them in your library or classroom; share other ideas and thought.
  • Step 3: Link to your project: either post a link to your project in the blog post OR embed it in the blog post if the tool you chose has that feature available.

Want to do something different? More Learning Activity Ideas to Explore

  • Pick an iPad or Android presentation app to explore.
  • Brainstorm an idea for using tools with your students.
  • Search for some lesson plans/ideas that you might use as inspiration. Discuss how you might implement them.
  • Or any other creative project that involves storytelling/presentation tools.

*TURNING IN YOUR ASSIGNMENT

  • Write & publish your blog post.
  • Copy the URL (webpage address) for your post.
  • Return to your Google Classroom, find the assignment page for the lesson you just completed and follow the directions for turning in and sharing your work.

Below are several tools that can easily become part of your online environment. With each tool there is an example of a completed presentation.

Canva

An easy-to-learn, online drag-and-drop tool for creating slideshow presentations, fliers, ebooks and other resources. Canva offers stock photos, illustrations, icons, fonts and shapes. Canva also offers opportunities for collaboration and is available on their website and/or through their mobile application. Click here for an example.

Easel.ly

An infographic generator with no login required, Easel.ly offers a multitude of templates that are easily searchable and can be adjusted to create a new product. Users can create a free account, which allows them to save and download their final product. Click here for an example.

Emaze

A stunning presentation tool that offers templates for slide shows, video presentations and 3-D presentations. Users can import presentations from PowerPoint, add background music, create graphs and add hyperlinks to outside content or to slides within a presentation. Click here for an example.

LiveBinders

An online digital binder where users can add web links, documents (including PDFs), images and videos. Users can systematically arrange content by tabs and even subtabs to organize material, which could replicate the process of progressing through a learning module. Multiple users can collaborate on binders; the free account offers up to 10 binders. Click here for an example.

Sway

A Microsoft program that offers the ability to create interactive presentations, newsletters, photos, videos, etc., where the final product looks like a website. The presentation offers transition options with horizontal or vertical movement replicating animation on a website. Sway provides templates and tutorials to help new users learn the system quickly, and projects can easily be shared by a link. Click here for an example.

Thinglink

A digital canvas with interactive capabilities that can increase student engagement. Users can import an image that serves as the canvas backdrop. Once the background canvas is chosen, users can add tags that appear in numerical order on top of the image, which can scaffold the content. Tags can include text, images, videos, website links and rich media. It’s a collaborative tool that allows others to comment on the final product. Click here for an example.

Vizia

An interactive formative assessment presentation tool, where users can identify a video, upload it to Vizia and then create interactions. Some interactive features include multiple-choice questions, true/false questions, polls and open-ended questions. Users can set up analytics where answers go directly to a Google Drive spreadsheet. Click here for an example.

Conclusion

As students, our time is spent studying, cramming for exams, practicing dribbling (if you’re a basketball player), and other critical activities. There are very few hours left in the day for any extracurricular activities, let alone creating presentations. Thankfully, there are many free online presentation tools that can help you create fancy presentations, just like the pros.

Leave a Comment