Some of our faculty are moving away from traditional end-of-semester assessments, such as term papers and high-stakes final exams, in favor of projects that can be scaffolded over a period of time. These may include having students share their research in an oral presentation, poster, or website. The question is, how do you support their research output? Fortunately, we have some solutions!
If your students are doing either oral presentations or electronic posters, check out Prezi Next, the new version of the online presentation application. [See our post on the original version, The Power of Prezi, from October 2014.] The new version, which runs on HTML5 rather than Adobe Flash, offers many more templates, a more intuitive interface, supports more file types, and is easier to navigate while presenting. While Prezi is great for a linear presentation, one advantage is that presentations can be designed to be non-linear, useful for facilitating a less formal discussion for example.
Looking for a presentation software that allows for easy collaboration among student team members? Check out Google Slides. Like Google Docs and Google Sheets, access to the slides can be shared and multiple users can work on the sides remotely and simultaneously—there’s even a chat feature to make group editing easy. There are some nicely designed templates, themes in Google-speak, and you can easily integrate content from Google spread sheets and documents. There is also a downloadable version of Google Slides for desktop use.
If you don’t like the templates in PowerPoint or Google Slides, check out Slides Carnival, which has many creative templates available for download, including fonts, icon sets, maps, and charts, graphs, and tables styled for each template. These work with both PowerPoint and Google Slides.
If you are looking to have your students create a website, Google Sites has recently come out with a new version of its website creation application. When you sign into Google Sites you can choose to use the classic version or the new one. The new version gives you fewer options (just six themes available currently), but is a snap to use, being essentially drag and drop. There no messing with HTML code, and it is easy to tie into the content from your other Google apps. There is an “add editors” feature that will facilitate group work. It’s a great option when you want your students to be focused on creating content, not on struggling with technology.
We also have some resources for students doing presentations and posters—online videos on creating and designing effective PowerPoint presentations and posters, as well as some handouts on these topics. See Presentation Strategies on the CER website. If your students (or you) are looking for freely-available and rights-free visual resources (images and multimedia) check out CER’s Visual Resources page.
Macie Hall, Senior Instructional Designer
Center for Educational Resources
Image Source: cc Wikimedia Commons
