Cat Tech

Presentation Design survey

Presentations and images

The ability to design and deliver a presentation to an audience is one skill that we can teach our students that will have life-long application. For the past ten years, we have integrated Powerpoint (and now Keynote) presentations into our curriculum, giving our students valuable experience with this skill. I do not know, however, how much time we have devoted to the fundamentals of good slide design.

In this post, I would like to address one facet of good design, using images for the greatest impact. We have all seen presentations that were just massive blocks of text, usually bullet-pointed, that was then read to us. What presenters should be doing is telling a story, and sometimes that story is accentuated by an image.

Imagine a story being told about ancient Rome and the transition from Republic to Empire; to tell that story well, we would need to talk about Julius Caesar. (You can substitute any topic, figure, event, or issue that you want.)

This is the default slide that Powerpoint encourages. Notice the title, picture, and box of bullet points.

This slide could be fancied up by applying a template or some color, but that does not change the "design" of the slide.

The version below is slightly better in that it moved the dates of Caesar's life into the context of Caesar's image, and it has removed the block of text. The block of text should be spoken by the presenter and expanded upon. All too often though, that text is read to us, and then the slide is advanced to the next. The slide below is better because the audience will focus more on the presenter, and the presenter will have to talk about Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon and all that entailed.

Notice how much more effective the above slide is, compared to the one below. A picture is far more engaging than clip-art, which should almost never be used.

Returning to the slide with Caesar's image, I think it would have greater impact if the limited text that we have on the slide now "popped" more; it needs to have greater contrast. For some reason, white text on a black background has greater impact.

It is looking good! There is still quite a bit of unnecessarily blank space on the slide. If a slide is going to have an image, then use the image to its fullest, as in the slide below.

As with all things, it is possible to go too far. The slide below, for example, has stretched the image too far, distorting its properties, and distending poor Caesar's face.

Below is the final version of the slide. I've added a citation for the image, since I did not take the photograph. Given even the barest of information as in this caption, one could search for "Andrew Hitchcock" 2006 "julius caesar" and find the image without any difficulty.

I think the slide above provides a good background for a presenter to talk around. They cannot read from the slide, but the audience is able to see a picture of Julius Caesar while hearing about him, and they have an important quotation that serves as a historical benchmark, as well as the most relevant year in terms of the story being told.

With a little more time to invest, I might consider making the strangely shaded background behind the photo of Caesar's bust transparent. That would put the bust, with its while marble, directly atop the stark black background for extra impact.

Comments in EasyGrade Pro

As part of the Course Status Report discussion at last week's Academic Council meeting, the issue came up of making grade reporting more informative. EasyGrade Pro has two built-in options that enable teachers to provide additional feedback when entering grades; this feedback is viewable by students and parents alike when grades are published to the web or emailed out by teachers.

The first way of providing additional feedback for an individual grade in EasyGrade Pro is by using footnotes. Simply right-click on a grade and choose a footnote from the pop-up list.

If you do not like the list of available footnotes, they are very easy to change. At the bottom of the list (marked in orange above) is a link that will allow you to change the footnotes. Please note that

• the list of footnotes is only for the current class; you can define a separate list for each of your classes, and
• footnotes are best for often-repeated remarks, such as "Score reduced because assignment turned in late."

The second way to provide additional feedback is using a Score Note. This is a free-form comment field that allows you to provide a greater degree of feedback than the Footnotes. To access this, double-click on a grade, and the following box will appear.

The Score Note function defaults to a private state; anything typed in is for the teacher only. To make the remarks viewable to students, per the yellow above, choose the second option, "Note is for student." After you have done this once, the Score Note will remember your selection, and any future Score Notes will be pre-set for students to see.

Whether you use Footnotes or the Score Note feature, when you publish grades to the internet or email them out, the additional feedback that you have entered will also be published (unless you kept the Score Note set to "Note is for teacher.")

Using the Footnotes for oft-repeated feedback or the Score Note for more detailed comments, EasyGrade pro provides two ways for teachers to provide additional information on an individual grade.

[To see other posts related to EasyGrade Pro, click on the EGP tag to the right.]

Posting Keynote to web

Apple-folks, I was asked how to post Keynote presentations to the web for students to review.

First, know that Keynote files are Apple-only. There is a simple export function that will allow you to convert your Keynote presentation into a PC-compatible Powerpoint file. Under the Share menu, choose "Export", and then select Powerpoint.

Second, know that Keynote files are not files in the way that we normally think of files, they are containers. That is to say, a Keynote "file" is most similar to a folder. Your Mac knows that this folder belongs to Keynote and that everything inside of it is related, so it treats it as a file - but not all applications know this, and other computers certainly don't. This is why it is sometimes difficult to email a Keynote file; it's like emailing a whole folder - which can rarely be done. And this is why you cannot simply post a Keynote file to your website or CatLink (our in-house Moodle install, for our outside readers).

Back to the original question then, how can we post Keynote files to the web for students? I recommend converting to PDF. You could do it through the Share menu and the conversion dialog shown above - simply choose PDF instead of PPT. This will put one slide on one 8.5x11 page, if students print. That strikes me as wasteful, and so I recommend using the Print dialog, and placing multiple slides on a single piece of paper.

Begin through File > Print, and then follow the screenshots below.

At the PDF button (step 3 above), choose "Save as PDF." This will result in a PDF suitable for students to print, whether they are on Macs or PCs.

As always, if you have questions, please let me know.

Apple Keynote Demo

Because Keynote is different enough from Microsoft Powerpoint, and more Mac-folks are using it now, I ran three sessions of a workshop for the application last week. The Apple website does a better job of describing Keynote than I could, so I merely point you in that direction if you are interested in an overview of how Keynote is different from Powerpoint.

If you were not able to come to the workshop but would still like to see what was covered, here is the demo file that was used:

Keynote Demo

There are hints, descriptions, and directions in the Presenter Notes. To see them, go to View > Show Presenter Notes.

I recommend setting your Keynote application to look similar to the screenshot below.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

As always, if you have any questions, please let me know.

Turnitin.com and file formats

The anti-plagiarism service that we subscribe to, turnitin.com, will accept student papers in a variety of file formats. On the rare occasion when a student has a word processing program that the service is unfamiliar with, or a file format that the service does not yet accept, there is a simple work-around for students. When they click on the submit button (shown to the right), they can change the first drop-down menu from "Single file upload" to "Cut & paste upload."

This will allow students to submit a paper from any word processing application, even an online service like Google Docs.

Washington and Lincoln

Doing my usual Sunday-lesson-planning, I ran across this quote and was deeply moved by it:

"Washington taught the world to know us. Lincoln taught us to know ourselves. The first won for us our independence. The last wrought out our manhood and self respect" (The Expositor).

Somewhere in there is a connection to our our Mission and Vision. I humbly leave that as a thought for the day.

Google Calendar tips and tricks

A number of folks around campus use Google Calendar as a collaboration medium. Web Worker Daily (a great blog on productivity) has a great collection of tips and tricks that are well worth looking through. Some are on the more-technical side of things, but if you need help, the Tech Department and/or I can help.

Tips and Tricks: Making the Most of Google Calendar

If you are not yet using Google Calendar in any way and are interested in learning more, please let me know. Google Calendar works well with Apple iCal, and a small plug-in allows Windows-folks to use it with Outlook too.

Getting It Wrong

Scientific American has an excellent article summarizing recent research on how the brain learns, and how the cognitive process of learning interacts with the physiology of it. Getting It Wrong: Surprising tips on how to learn by Henry L Roediger and Brigid Finn is well worth reading by anyone who works creates situations in which someone learns a new skill or new content knowledge.

The short version is this: "People remember things better, longer, if they are given very challenging tests on the material, tests at which they are bound to fail."

Blackboards 2.0

There is a very nice article in today's Baltimore Sun, Blackboards 2.0, by Arin Gencer, about wikis being used to record and extend the learning from a class.

The wikis are being used in a variety of ways.

• The "wiki for advanced placement U.S. history has become an extension of his classroom, a place where he can point his students to additional resources tied to what they are learning - such as a podcast lecture on the Salem witch trials."
• Notes from class conversations are recorded in the class wiki, and then homework asks students to return to the wiki and continue adding thoughts.
• Teachers have created a professional development wiki for themselves, where they post relevant PD links.

Catlink has a built-in wiki that is quite good for these purposes. [You can access the full help pages on the Moodle site.] By way of example: a wiki is just text that can be formatted as usual, and to make new pages & add new links, you simply surround a word in brackets.

 In AP Psychology, I had the problem of students forgetting their summer reading by the time the AP test rolled around. The book they had read provided summaries of famous psychological studies and experiments that students needed to remember at the end of the year. To create some kind of permanent record of what they'd read, I created a wiki for the students to fill in. I created one page, and they did the rest of the work for themselves. The page that I created was a simple table that had a list of the book's chapters, and then an assigned student who had to then summarize that chapter.

Students merely clicked on the question mark next to their name, and the wiki created the new page for them, and automatically linked to it. All students needed to do was type in their summary on the new page, and save it. This is a great tool, as the teachers and students around Baltimore are finding.