I have always thought of presentation tools as strictly tools for power point presentations for school assignments or the rare time that I have needed to make one for an educational inservice at work. This assignment has really opened up the possibilities of applications for this format and allowed me to think outside of the power point/keynote box that I had formally worked in. The online tools offer up a variety of backgrounds, formats, options, and templates like the powerpoint/keynote tools that I had previously used but with new and more advanced options.
Emaze was easy to sign up for and I was able to start using their presentation templates immediately. Using the site was straight forward and easy. Choosing options was intuitive and I did not feel like I struggled to figure out how to utilize the tools. I did find a few things that were frustrating. After I had deleted an excess slide, I erased text on my last slide in order to replace it with my own text. After I started typing I thought the font looked different than it had, in order to compare I hit the rounded backwards arrow, typically representing an undo option. Instead of the new text disappearing and being replaced with the text that I had deleted, the excess slide that I had deleted came back to the end of my presentation. Also, when I attempted to replace some of the given images of the slide templates, the options I was given were to use my own or to search the web, with the warning: images may be subject to copyright. I think it would be a nice option to have searchable creative commons images instead of just random web searches. The image results were also not appropriate to my search. While I got cats when I searched it, when I searched animated cat I got all sorts of unrelated pictures-none of which were animated. Emaze, however, did have some visually appealing templates in a variety of styles, each with template options for lists, graphs, and other options for slides. Emaze also had easy widget options which allow you to easily add social media feeds, paypal buy now button, and graph/form adds. I included a link to a short, 3 page presentation that I created with emaze to give an idea of their template options and quality.
https://www.emaze.com/@AOWOIIQZZ/libs602intro
Genial was another presentation creation site that was easy to sign up for and had easy, readily available templates. I did think that the templates available for Genial included some options that catered more toward the simplistic designs discussed in Presentationzen Design: A simple visual approach to presenting in today’s world by Garr Reynolds (2014). The templates come complete with relevant images and effects on the slides that offer pleasant and professional visual effects on the presentations. Unlike Emaze, when I wanted to replace an image it gave me pixabay as a search option, which I thought was really helpful and allowed me to find an appropriate image that I knew I could use appropriately in my presentation. I thought the buttons and options were intuitive and the first time you open a template to use, different buttons highlight with a brief description of their use, which you could choose to skip. It was easy to add effects or links to images, including social media image buttons which could be used to add links in order to connect to social media pages or posts. I have included a 3 page presentation with the same style of information, in order to allow for comparison to the other options.
https://view.genial.ly/5eecc2af89aee60d680536c2/presentation-libs602intro
Prezi was the third presentation site that I chose to use for this practice. I love the style of one image that includes links to all of the slides and aspects of the presentation and think that this is the best option for educational slides that someone will be using to self-educate. I also think it makes for a smooth and visually appealing presentation. I personally like this format and its simplicity and visual appeal. It also clearly allows for the entire presentation to be smooth and unified, easily capturing the harmony discussed in Chapter 9 (Reynolds, G., 2014, p. 221-34). I did find that this template format, however, is not as intuitive. For someone like me, who has limited and mostly outdated presentation tool experience, it wasn’t nearly as easy to jump into as the other two sites. I started creating a presentation and found that it took me longer to get started as I had to determine what all of my options for ‘sections’ should be, as it’s not as obvious a format as a linear slide option. I also found that each piece had a different formatting option, each pre-chosen but able to be changed. I found changing the main title easily done but had to try a few times in order to change the title of the mid-range bubbles. When I initially double-clicked, it zoomed in on the bubble itself and I had to zoom out and figure out that I needed to double click when a blue square appeared around the title in order to highlight and change it. Each bubble and option could be deleted, re-formatted, and of course, given new text. The undo and redo button was in the top left, easily spotted and used. It was also easy to navigate around the template, zooming in and out done with double clicking appropriately or with the zoom in/zoom out option in the bottom left which changed appropriately with whatever space you were currently in.
Presentation slides have such a wide variety of use in informal and formal settings. It is helpful to be familiar with a variety of tools or to be very sufficient in at least one in order to create the most appropriate presentation. Currently I feel the most comfortable and likely to use Genial over Emaze, as I loved the pixabay option for images and found them otherwise fairly comparable. I love the style of Penzi but feel that it is time consuming for me to use it and need to practice more with the site and its templates before it will be efficient for me to use it. Since I wasn’t able to complete a presentation, I am offering a link to the template that I was playing around with.
I appreciate when software has built-in image searching, but even more so when they only yield results that are allowed to be used. I know that, ultimately, the onus is on me to verify my results, but if a site links to Pixabay, I know I am set. While searching on Emaze allows the user to filter down to search Flickr, I’m not as familiar with that site and I believe it includes images that are not useable through Creative Commons.
Yes, that was also what I saw. I don’t even want to see images I don’t know that I can use, that would just be frustrating. I only want to see useable options!