IT for Education

I've been teaching now for almost a decade, a large portion of which has included some form of presentation (usually a PowerPoint) as a core element of delivery. I've never really given too much thought into the specific reasons why and how I use PowerPoint, I've just considered it a convenient way to organize topics and structure a lecture. It's probably time to look more closely. My own exposure to PowerPoint has mostly come from student presentations, the quality of which I shall be positive about and call 'variable'. I've also bumped into it with the brief stints of employment I've had in business offices, as another media type to deal with doing AV support at corporate events, and whenever a speaker has used it at a conference I've attended or viewed on-line. I've experienced very little in the way of PowerPoint teaching, going through school as I did before the software was quite so ingrained (although I am now getting plenty of it for my...

We had a look at a few alternative tools to create slide presentations. Powerpoint is by far the most well known, but we also looked at Prezi and one I hadn't seen called Nearpod. MS Powerpoint www.office.com/powerpoint Powerpoint is Microsoft's ubiquitous and long-established presentation application. It's by far the most feature-rich of all the tools out there, but that comes at the expense of accessibility, with many functions untouched and unknown about by most users. MS have tried to alleviate this in recent versions with their 'ribbon' interface, but the fact remains most people only scratch the surface of what this software can do. Until recently Powerpoint was a solely paid-for package, but in recent times Microsoft have made multiple entry points, from the full-blown commercial offering to free versions with reduced (but still compelling) functionality. It's now available on pretty much every platform out there, including mobile and the web. Power...