Post XVIII. Haiku Deck

When working on my SlideShare presentation for the Knowledge Sharing and Tracking project, I noticed that the SlideShare website outsources the in-built presentation-construction service to another company, Haiku Deck. I became interested in that company, especially after finding out they offer an iPad application for creating and sharing presentations.

I recommend Haiku Deck for iPad to everyone who constantly need to develop presentations and prefer being mobile at the same time. This is a great tool for both study and business purposes. It provides the user with lots of slide templates and a big set of Creative Commons pictures to choose from, which makes the process of the slides development significantly faster. The application also includes a collection of fonts and alternatives for slides’ layout.

What I like most about Haiku Deck for iPad is that the app has intuitive editing options, so every content piece can be relocated or redesigned in seconds. The company presents the software as a tool for quick idea sharing, and my perception of it is the same.

Watch the demo video below and download Haiku Deck for iPad for free to test its functionality. 

Are you familiar with other mobile applications for presentation creation?

Post XVI. PowToon

Nowadays, there are a lot of tools that aim to make content presentations not only informative, but also engaging.

PowToon is a web-based software of that kind. It is a constructor that allows you to create animated videos and presentations by using a set of predesigned templates. The process of the creation of a video is very simple. When you are in the construction mode of the PowToon software, you generate a group of slides just like you usually do while working on a presentation. Then, PowToon combines this collection of slides into a video so that each slide represents one video scene. PowToon has a drag-and-drop interface, which enables the creation process to be very fast. The software is integrated with GoogleDrive.

PowToon offers free and paid usage plans. The produced video presentation can be shared on YouTube and Facebook freely, but to download the video to your computer, you should pay for subscription. Unsurprisingly, paid versions of the software have more animated and still templates to choose from.

Watch a short video about the history of presentation software created using PowToon.

Do you like the idea of such entertaining presentations? As students, would you like your professors to invest their time, money, and effort in this software? As teaching personnel, would you try it on your lessons?

Post VII. Poll Everywhere

There are lots of wonderful business tools on the Internet, and some of them may be easily adapted for the needs of a teacher or a learning technologist. Poll Everywhere exemplifies such a tool. The idea behind it is quite simple: To provide a speaker with an opportunity to receive immediate feedback from his/her audience. The realization of that idea is even simpler. To start, the speaker creates an account on the PollEverywhere website; next step is to post the question the speaker would like to ask and (optionally) possible answers to this question. After that, those people whom the speaker plans to survey go to the speaker’s account, read the posted question, and click on the answer variant they perceive to be true. What is great is that Poll Everywhere plots real-time graphs, so the speaker has an opportunity to assess the collected data and decide on his/her further actions immediately. It should be also noted that the only resource the speaker needs is the Internet connection. The limited version of the tool (for 25 respondents) is free.

The short video below demonstrates how Poll Everywhere works.

I see several ways of applying Poll Everywhere to learning enhancement. First, it can be used for quizzes in the same manner as the clicker technology is utilized at FSU. Second, the tool is great for collecting feedback from students and adjusting instruction in accordance with their learning needs. Finally, Poll Everywhere enables a teacher to monitor some teamwork activities, such as brainstorming or problem solving. 

Do you have any other ideas on how Poll Everywhere and similar services can be utilized in education?

Post V. Article. To Use or Not to Use Web 2.0 in Higher Ed?

Among class materials from one of my other courses, I found an article with an intriguing title: To Use or Not to Use Web 2.0 in Higher Education? It was written by Gabriela Grosseck in 2009 and can be found here.

It seems that Grosseck adores using lists of points for presenting her ideas. I usually do not appreciate that style of writing because it overwhelms me a lot. However, in some cases it may be useful. For instance, this “points-based” organization of an article facilitates search for a concrete idea that you would like to cite, but have forgotten its particular place in the text.

The article focuses on the advantages and disadvantages of the utilization of Web 2.0 tools for enhancing student learning in higher education. It also includes a list of particular examples on how the Web 2.0 tools she identified can be used in the classroom (blogging for quick peer-to-peer feedback, wikis for class FAQ, etc.)

Post II. Explain Everything

Last Fall semester, I needed to develop instruction in the form of a video lecture. There was also a restriction: No “talking heads” used. So, that project made me search for some creative ways of instruction development. As a result, I found a brilliant application called Explain Everything. It represents a whiteboard where you can put anything you would like (e.g., pictures, videos, drawings, text boxes, etc.) and screencast that “putting” process. I used the app on my iPad, but it also runs on Android and Windows. Its current price in the App Store is  $2.99 (not sure it is the same for Google Play).

If you ever need a lecture-capturing tool, Explain Everything is the answer due to being cheap and comfortable in use. You don’t need a stylus to work with this app; everything can be done with your fingers. Among the features that I like most is that the app allows me to access my Dropbox account for importing of any types of files located there and exporting of the videos I completed.

Check out the app’s promo video below to see how it functions.