I chose to explore Prezi, Smore, Genially, and Haiku Deck for this week’s assignment.  I actually made my presentation with Prezi first before I explored any of the other presentation platforms, which probably wasn’t the best idea. I decided to create a presentation with Prezi because I wanted to make a timeline for my digital learning assignment. I decided to use Prezi because that was the only presentation platform I had heard of, even though I never used it.  I think my Prezi presentation came out okay, but there were some challenges that could make it difficult to create a clean presentation that would make Garr Reynolds proud. While you are able to change the size of the font, you have to use a button with an A- or A+ to change the size of the font, which makes it difficult to use the same font size on different slides. It was also difficult to move text boxes around without moving the wrong thing.  I also didn’t find the undo button until I was almost done with my presentation, which added to my frustration.  After exploring Genially, I think I could have made a presentation similar to Prezi with less frustration.  Here is the link to my Prezi presentation. Please let me know what you think of it!

https://prezi.com/view/VuLfUUesyIGOCJDSwzF0/

After signing up for Genially, I saw that I could make quizzes and infographics, as well as presentations. I spent time exploring the infographics available. At first, I kept picking infographics that were only available with a premium version, but then I was able to filter those out. I found that it was easy to change the font so that everything could be uniform. I also liked that I could easily search through pictures with a Creative Commons License from Pixabay. If I choose to redo the presentation I made with Prezi for my digital learning assignment, I will use Genially.

Smore seems like a great option for teacher introduction letters, especially since you can print the newsletters straight  from the site. It was easy to change the background and to add information and links to the templates on Smore. I thought I saw something about having access to images with Creative Commons Licenses directly through Smore, but I couldn’t find how to access them. I know that some teachers have used that newsletter format as an agenda/presentation, but I think there are other platforms that would be easier for me to use to create presentations. 

Last of all, I tried to explore Haiku Deck. I saw that they created a teacher’s guide and that the platform integrated with Google Classroom. However, I was not able to access the free trial. Both yesterday and today, whenever I clicked on the free trial button, all I got was an error message. I guess their system is down, which doesn’t make me confident in using their platform. What if I wasn’t able to access a presentation I created using Haiku Deck while I was in the middle of a lesson?