Presentations

I have viewed Powerpoint presentations, but I have never actually made one, so I have very little to compare this to. I looked at a link on one of the lesson plans that explained some features and how they could be used for collaborative projects. The tutorial told of "colorful presence markers" (I'm assuming that lets the teacher know who contributed what), the ability to be edited by multiple people from multiple locations, the existence of a revision history, and the chat feature. These features seemed to be very similar  to the Documents features and do seem to be designed particularly well for collaborative learning projects. I also like the idea that, assuming students have internet access at home (I'm not sure if that is a big assumption, but I plan for that to be one of the first questions I ask students to answer in a quick survey when I start teaching) students can work together without having to go to each other's homes. I don't know if the features listed above are available with Powerpoint, or if they might require additional software or work to hook up, but I thought they would definitely be useful in a classroom setting.

I looked at the presentations in each of the middle school lesson plans, and saw some things that I thought were really cool, although perhaps they are very standard features. I liked that it was possible to not just change the size of lettering, but to also change how dark the letters appeared, so that certain words stand out in a sentence. (in the Science plan) I also loved the background of the spiral notebook in the grass for the kitten story in the Language Arts plan. (I assume that was a template.) I was also surprised that it was possible to make choices in which slide would be next in a presentation (choice A or choice B)! This could be an interesting feature in a teacher designed review. Students could choose from multiple answers and if they choose incorrectly could get a reference to what they need to review and perhaps some silly message or helpful hint.