Thursday 1 March 2012

Bringing PowerPoint Presentations to Life

This week a blog post by Melissa Seideman caught my attention, as it shows how to take PowerPoint one step further to create exciting audio presentations that can be used as teaching aids.

There are several tools put there that can be used to produce some very engaging presentations, but there are also many people that still like the familiarity of using PowerPoint and for them the free tool HelloSlide could prove really useful.

On her blog Melissa notes:

HelloSlide is a wonderful way to transform a lesson into an audio-rich lesson that seems like a live presentation…I can see HelloSlide being used multiple ways in the classroom. It could be used to teach a particular concept in class, previewing the night before, teaching a lesson using the “flipped” model, can be translated for ESL students, or even used in alternative assessment projects in which students teach the class a particular concept.”

How it works:

1. To get started using Hello Slide, register for a free account, upload a PDF of your slides.
2. Type the speech for your presentation and HelloSlide automatically generates the audio. (The text is automated but does sound reasonable).

Below is a presentation on iPads that was created by Kathy Schrock, also using HelloShare. Hopefully this will demonstrate the benefits of using audio in this way (by simply entering text which the pc will read aloud) and how that can transform an existing presentation into a useful standalone learning resource.





Thanks to Melissa and Kathy for sharing.


To read more of Wobble click here.

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