I typically use google slides for presentations, but I found some interesting alternatives when experimenting with this week’s sandbox.
I didn’t use Prezi, since I’m familiar with it. I’ve used it in class before. Honestly the zoom in and out feature makes me dizzy.
I’ve used canva before and I like it to make infographics or one-pagers, not so much presentations.
I like Smore, but the free version doesn’t allow you to have too many newsletters, so it’s not something I would use regularly. It has a variety of templates available. I liked the ones created by educators for assignments. Those would be a more exciting visual than my run of the mill assignment pages. You can link media into the newsletter easily. Editing is intuitive.
I opened Haiku Deck, but I didn’t want to start a 7-day free trial with my credit card. I always forget to unsubscribe in time. The opening page did seem to push some ideas from Reynolds’ book. It talked a lot about simplicity and clarity. It also feature themes where the picture takes up the whole background–something that shows up in Reynolds’ work as well.
Genial.ly was my favorite of these tools. I liked that you could select pages ahead of time. That helped me plan out what I was going to present. It reminds me a bit of canva. It’s easy to follow because it’s intuitive. It offers interactive features, “smartblocks” or graphs, and its own clipart. I especially like that it has unsplash, pixabay, and giphy built in. I know kids would like to use giphy in their own presentations. I also like that you can add collaborators to a presentation. I would use this for the Resource Presentation Assignment because it’s easy to edit, offers many free capabilities, and creates a clean presentation.
Here’s the link to my 3 slide presentation, created using Genial.ly. https://view.genial.ly/60e30c0151f9eb0d69c5aa8e/presentation-basic-presentation
I didn’t notice the Giphy built-in with Genial.ly, but you’re absolutely right that many of our students would LOVE to incorporate that! It could be a lot of fun, too, such as using GIFs to describe reactions to different books, characters, or moments within a story.
I can see something like this being showcased on a TV somewhere so that it just had continual slides about books to read. I like your simplicity and feel like the author of our textbook would appreciate it as well.
I also had trouble with Haiku Deck which is disappointing because I was looking forward to using it.
I created something on Haiku Deck and so far every time I click on the link it generated, it says internal server error. Disappointing!
Thanks for the book recommendations!
I, too, was reluctant to try Haiku Deck. I was about to close out of it when I saw fine print at the bottom that said you could try it free without putting in your credit card information. The catch is that you can only make three decks before it pushes you to buy. Ultimately, though, you lucked out, as Haiku Deck is very glitchy and was a frustrating experience.
I’m glad that you had success with Genial.ly. I’m looking forward to using it for my Digital Learning assignment.
I keep seeing Echo Mountain’s cover, so I’m going to have to find this one!
I felt that same way about Haiku Deck. Not worth it, even though it looked promising. I just have to be able to do *something* with the free version to make it even worth looking at. I ultimately went with Genial.ly, too and found it really easy to use.
I love Canva for other designs, but haven’t really used it for presentations.