Today, the world is more connected than ever before. Students have more access to learning opportunities, information, events, and other people. Online presentations give students the opportunity to collaborate with other students across the globe, no matter their age or grade level. Presentation websites are a wonderful tool for this type of collaborative learning.
Today, students have more access to learning opportunities, information, events, and other people. Presentation websites are a wonderful tool for this type of collaborative learning.
PowerPoint
It gets a bad rap for being boring in meetings and a crutch for uninspired orators, but PowerPoint provides a lot of bang for the buck when it comes to teaching students some important presentation basics. Once you learn the ins and outs of inserting and sizing images, PowerPoint offers the easiest way to introduce your students to graphic design tools to arrange pictures and texts in pleasing ways—without splurging on a full Adobe suite or other artist’s tools.
Pro Tip: Remind your students that slides are for enhancing presentations, not just reading from verbatim, and you can help break the cycle of dull PowerPoint presentations for the next generation.
Easelly
Infographics are incredibly popular online, and for good reason: They help make sense of facts, figures, and statistics by illustrating their meaning and drawing connections between them. These are crucial skills for students learning to research, so why not let them create infographics to organize their findings? Easelly provides templates for students to use. Once they’ve chosen a format, they can type in their info and customize artwork to develop a fun, easy-to-read infographic on their topic.
Animoto
Teaching your class the finer points of video editing is very time-consuming, but Animoto lets you take a major shortcut. This drag-and-drop program makes it easy for students to add video clips, photos, and text that they cut together into a short, share the video. This is perfect for creating PSAs, trailers, and advertisements as a capstone project, and teachers can get it for free.
VoiceThread
VoiceThread is a platform that allows your students to share their presentations in a brand new way. It’s not presentation software on its own, but it adds a layer of interaction to the projects your students have already made. Upload a photo, report, slideshow, video, or other presentation into VoiceThread for others to see and comment on. Once they’ve seen your work, students and teachers can add video comments and questions for more personal interaction. This is a great way to foster collaboration and critique via technology — particularly good for asynchronous teaching and learning.
Pro Tip: Be sure to discuss good digital citizenship with your students as part of any VoiceThread projects so you can leave constructive comments online!
Nearpod
Nearpod is a tool for creating and delivering interactive presentations, formative or summative assessments, and content related to SEL, digital citizenship, vocabulary, social justice, and more. Teachers use the site to create original multimedia presentations or draw from an extensive library of free and cost-based standards-aligned offerings. Teachers can upload videos, images, audio clips, and files as well as embed multiple-choice quizzes and polls. Drawing tools, collaboration boards, and open-ended questions provide plenty of variety to liven up presentations. Teachers can launch presentations and monitor progress either from the website or through the app, and they can choose whether or not to make students’ names visible. Students can access presentations via a code.
Teachers can interact with students in person or virtually and view student responses in real time, enabling students to take ownership of their learning rather than passively view a teacher-directed, whole-class presentation. Teachers can also control in-class timing or launch homework sessions in which students move through lessons at their own pace. Either way, it’s easy to see who’s viewing the presentation, which helps to manage the classroom and reinforce the appropriate use of technology.
Shadow Puppet Edu
Using Shadow Puppet Edu, students can create video slideshows, adding their own narration and text. Videos can be up to 30 minutes long and can include up to 100 images, free for classroom use. A video tutorial demonstrates how to make a video, and several sample videos are included as well. To create a new video, students tap the Create New icon and choose their images from the several resources included: the camera roll, other app libraries on the device, the Library of Congress, Maps, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Library, NASA, and NOAA, as well as results from web searches that can be done within the app. Students just tap the images to include them. They can reorder images or move on to recording sound and adding text. To narrate the video, students simply hit Start and talk while they scroll through the images. They can zoom in on certain parts of the image as they speak, or add text or clip art.
When finished with their creations, students click Save and can then share the video via social media. It’s automatically saved to the device’s camera roll and online, accessible via a direct link. Slideshows can also be shared directly into Seesaw: The Learning Journal.
Explain Everything Whiteboard
Explain Everything Whiteboard is a presentation app that can integrate content from many sources, enabling teachers and students to use it to create lessons, tutorials, and more for class or personal use. A full-featured adaptation of Explain EDU, this formidable tool is like a superhero version of PowerPoint. Users can import photos, PDF files, movies, websites, and more from iTunes, Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, WebDAV, and other sources to use in a presentation. Explain Everything can also be used as a whiteboard. Tap on New Project and choose a blank project screen or import from one of many sources (you must enter your username and password information for that source on the linking screen). A white screen with tool options stacked on the left side appears, and users can begin to import content, write, and record audio or video for the presentation. Finally, save (it also autosaves) and playback the presentation. You can also split and edit your audio recordings, which is great for taking out sections without having to redo large portions of the presentation.
The subscription to this app includes the ability to sign in on a variety of devices, including iOS, Windows, and Chrome OS. It also offers Explain Drive, which provides each user cloud storage with a variety of privacy options. Explain Drive allows you to search subject areas for already completed presentations, as well.
GOOGLE SLIDES
Google Slides is definitely one of the best presentation makers out there! Just like all Google products, it’s intuitive in use, comes with a variety of handy advanced features, and one thing we love about it the most – it is integrated with Google Drive. This enables students to store, manage, share, and cross-use their presentations with ease.
As for the features, Google Slides has everything you may need from a presentation tool. There are some standard features, such as different text fonts, insertion of multimedia, various animated transitions and styles, and much more. In addition, Google Slides offers handy collaborative features and surprises with a decent gallery of beautiful presentation templates.
CANVA
The next great tool is Canva. It is a free, intuitive, and simple tool packed with lots of exciting features and customizable elements. Canva makes creating outstanding presentations easy for everyone. It lets you pick from thousands of excellent templates to make your presentation shine. There are also hundreds of fonts that you can customize in a few simple clicks. Additionally, this tool offers you a good range of nice transitions, easily embed GIFs, videos, and Google Maps.
Last, but not least handy, is the library of millions of high-quality charts, illustrations, and images you can use to make your presentation truly great. And, once you finish working on it, Canva lets you share the project on social networks with a few simple clicks or use Presentation Mode to present it remotely right from your Canva account.
SLIDEBEAN
Another worthy tool is Slidebean, a free, web-based presentation maker powered by Artificial Intelligence. The tool allows you to create perfect, pro-looking presentations just in minutes thanks to a great range of templates for all purposes and types of audiences, and its intuitive layout.
Using this tool, you can also find a huge database of professional images, GIFs, and charts for pretty much every topic and audience. Users can also customize their presentations with different fonts, colors, logos, and other objects. But the best part is that once you finish a presentation with Slidebean, you can present it remotely from anywhere and track the activities on it.
Conclusion
Nowadays, there are many possibilities when it comes to online education. No matter your level or grade, you can be part of an online class, online discussion groups, and other collaborative learning opportunities. These classes and discussions will help students to build their skills and gain knowledge in a wide variety of topics.