Designing Effective Presentations

Every educator today needs to learn how to present effectively. But how much do they know about what makes an effective presentation?

Garr Reynolds, author of the popular book Presentation Zen Design, notes:

"For many of us, there is a hole in our education when it comes to visual communication... In the past, the tools for creating high-quality graphics and multimedia presentations belonged only to a select few. Today, those tools are in the hands of virtually anyone with a computer. However, possessing the hardware and software tools and knowing how to operate them does not a designer make." (p. 22, Presentation Zen Design). 

My colleague Dave and I are very passionate about Visual Literacy. We want to give educators the tools to develop their Visual Literacy skills, and presented recently to our fabulous Primary Leadership Team on Designing Effective Presentations.

Embedding the presentation here would not make sense. If you could understand the content of our presentation just by looking at the slides, then we would have failed in our job. There would be no point presenting if you could just read our slides! However, we did create some other resources which might be useful to share.

Handout

We wanted our audience engaged in our presentation. We didn't want them to feel they had to take copious notes as we spoke. We prepared this handout, because there were a few key things we wanted them to take away from the presentation, and we thought this 1-page handout could be posted at a desk to refer to when designing presentations later.



Finding Quality Images

Finding the right images to support the message you are sharing takes time - and is time well spent. This slide-doc takes you through how to find quality images. It is geared for teachers at our school, so bear that in mind as you look through.

Focus on the Audience

Really understanding what your audience needs and is hoping to gain from your presentation is important. We had participants in our workshop consider the needs of their audience using this handout we adapted from Nancy Duarte's fantastic resource Resonate.

Additional Resources

Some of our favourite resources for presentation design can be found here:

We hope you found these useful! Please let us know if you would like further information about designing effective presentations. 

How to Search for Creative Commons Licensed Images

One aspect of the UWCSEA Profile we can develop with our students is being principled by choosing Creative Commons Licensed images in our work. As mentioned in an earlier blog post, at UWCSEA (and many other leading schools), we believe that ethically, we have a responsibility to teach students (and teachers) about academic honesty and what Rodd Lucier terms "creative integrity."

To this end, we encourage our students to:

1. Create their own content first.
2. If this is not possible, we recommend searching for Creative Commons licensed content.
3. If they still can't find what they are looking for, the next step is to use a copyright image with permission from the original creator.
4. Only once they have exhausted the above steps, will we accept the use of copyright images, with attribution.

For some, this can seem a daunting prospect. Where do I even go to find CC licensed content?

The following tutorial will help alleviate some of those concerns. It will explore the use of search.creativecommons.org as a starting point for finding images. It also shows how you can reference any CC Licensed Flickr image easily using Cogdog's Flickr CC image bookmarklet (simply drag the blue button to your bookmarks bar and click to attribute from Flickr).

How to Search for Creative Commons Videos from UWC South East Asia on Vimeo.

For more information on Creative Commons, please read our blog post Creative Commons Explained.

Presentations with Haiku Deck

Haiku Deck is a wonderful free app for iPad which really encourages high quality presentations using Creative Commons images.

Here's a quick tutorial on how to get started:

1. Open the Haiku Deck app and click on the + button to start a new presentation.

2. Type in a title to your new presentation.

3. This is your user interface. There are 3 tabs on the left:
Text
Images
Layout  

4. Tap to add any text you want to appear while in the text tab. Don't use too many words! Space is limited for a reason.

5. This is the image tab. Type some keywords or click from the keywords suggested and scroll to select an image. A preview is available on the right.

6. This is the layout tab. This allows you to arrange your text on the page to best match your image.

7. To add a new slide, click on the + button at the bottom right.

I hope you enjoy making stunning presentations with your students!

Creative Commons Explained

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by A. Diez Herrero

As educators, we know that plagiarism is wrong, and we are very careful to share that message with our students. However, if you take a look at the pictures and images on display in most schools and classrooms, you will (probably) find hundreds of images that remain uncredited.
Why is it that so many of us think this is ok?

Legally, educators could argue that their usage falls under 'fair use' terms of copyright in educational settings. At UWCSEA (and many other leading schools), we believe that ethically, we have a responsibility to teach students (and teachers!) about academic honesty and what Rodd Lucier terms "creative integrity."

To this end, we encourage our students to:

1. create their own content first.
2. If this is not possible, we recommend searching for Creative Commons licensed content.
3. If they still can't find what they are looking for, the next step is to use a copyright image with permission from the original creator.
4. Only once they have exhausted the above steps, will we accept the use of copyright images, with attribution.

(For a PDF of the respecting creative work poster, please click here)

What is Creative Commons?
Creative Commons is a non-profit organisation that provides alternative licenses to Copyright. Creative Commons licences allow individuals to identify how they wish their content to be attributed, reused, remixed and/or shared.

Mission

"Creative Commons develops, supports, and stewards legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation."

Vision

"Our vision is nothing less than realizing the full potential of the Internet — universal access to research and education, full participation in culture — to drive a new era of development, growth, and productivity."

licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, http://creativecommons.org/about

What are the Creative Commons Licences?

Each of the four main Creative Commons licences are described below
(descriptions sourced from http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons).

Attribution

You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work - and derivative works based upon it - but only if they give you credit.

Non-Commercial

You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work - and derivative works based upon it - but for noncommercial purposes only.

Share Alike

You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.

No Derivatives

You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.

The licenses may be used in conjunction with each other, for example:

This licence means you are allowed to redistribute, both commercially and non-commercially, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.

(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/) 

More information on the licenses can be found here. Details on how to license different types of content (multimedia and more) can be found here. The video below is a very clear explanation of the licences in action.



How and Where do I search for Creative Commons Licensed Content?

The most straightforward source for Creative Commons Licensed content is to use the Creative Commons search engine. This way, you can select whether you're looking for images, music or video.

http://search.creativecommons.org/

Searching for Images

http://www.flickr.com/search/advanced/

 Flickr Advanced Search is my favourite place to find Creative Commons images, however you must remember to select the box underneath which says 'Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content' (see below), or you will just be carrying out a regular Flickr search.

Compfight is another good site for creative commons images, with a very visual interface.

www.compfight.com

 Picol & The Noun Project are both great for searching for icons - perfect if you are creating an infographic or presentation.

www.picol.org

www.thenounproject.com

Searching for Music

There are a number of great sites for finding creative commons music. Check out the ones below:

http://www.jamendo.com/en/

http://dig.ccmixter.org/

http://opsound.org/

http://soundbible.com/

Searching for Video

Most video sites now have an option for users to upload their content under Creative Commons licenses. Searching through the Creative Commons Search site is still the best bet though.

Using YouTube editor you can select the CC tab to search within Creative Commons licensed content on YouTube. This is good for remixing videos.

http://www.youtube.com/editor

Vimeo allows you to search for creative commons licensed videos. Choose which license you would like to find content under, then click browse. From there, click the magnifying glass to search within results.

https://vimeo.com/creativecommons

How do I reference Creative Commons Licensed Content?

There is a lot to remember in referencing Creative Commons licensed content (which I will outline below), but the good news is it is becoming easier and easier to do so.

You need to:

• Include the title of the work
• Credit the creator of the work
• Provide the URL where the work is hosted
• Include the type of license, and a link to the license conditions*

*if relevant, any copyright notices need to remain intact too.

Many of these details can be easily sourced from the Creative Commons website, together with the location of the work in question.

Alan Levine created a fantastically helpful Google Chrome Extension called Flickr CC Attribution Helper that integrates with Flickr to generate attribution strings for Creative Commons licensed photos.

Installing Flickr CC Attribution Helper in Chrome from UWC South East Asia on Vimeo.

You just copy and paste either the html code (if you want it on a website), or the plain text (for presentations & other print media).

There are several guides which have more detailed information on referencing Creative Commons Licensed content. Click here and here for more information.

How do I License my own Content under a Creative Commons License?

There is a very handy License Chooser at http://creativecommons.org/choose/ which guides you through the process of selecting the right license for your needs.

You can then get text or html versions of the license to put on your work.

Why Creative Commons?
I believe in the value of sharing. In education, sharing is crucially important. By using Creative Commons content, and licensing our content as Creative Commons, we show our students that we are willing to assist others, share what we create, and acknowledge the input of others. Pretty important messages, in my opinion. 

Impact Posters in Grade One

What's an Impact Poster you may ask? I had the exact same question! An Impact Poster uses a powerful image and a short sentence, quote, or piece of text to grab attention and highlight something of importance. 


This week the Grade one students created Impact Posters to demonstrate their learning. Some classes focused on the current unit of inquiry (communities) and other classes chose to focus on what good readers do and / or the learner profile. 


These are the steps we followed:


1) Good Searching
We discussed the importance of the words you put into a search box when looking for images. As a group we listed all the words we could think of to do with our topic. At this point we didn't judge any of the words or take any away, we decided to let the students find out which words yielded the best images.


2) Creative Commons Images
We discussed the importance of using Creative Commons images as a way of being a good digital citizen. 


3) Inappropriate Images
We can't control what people put on the internet but we can control our reactions to it. We took the time to list all the ways that we can deal with an image that makes us uncomfortable (close the program, scroll down, just ignore it, close your eyes, cover the screen with your hand, tell an adult and ask for help are just a few of the things our six year olds came up with) 


4) Appropriate Images
After finding the image that best suited the individual students thinking the image was put into a folder on a shared drive so the whole class could access the collected bank of images. Share and share alike.


5) Adding Text
The next job for the students was to pop the photo into a keynote. We used keynote as it is easy to click and drag images in and to add a text box. We wrote our statements on paper first so we could edit the spelling before we went to print.  


What did I learn?
I learned many things while working with our wonderfully creative Grade One students. First off I learned that what I think of as inappropriate and what they think of as inappropriate are two vastly different things. An image of a basement was deemed too scary to see and therefore not appropriate (and here I was worried about naked bodies!). Secondly I learned that I have to find a better way to credit the photos we use from Compfight and Flickr Advanced. For now I am going around after them adding in the credit - so not the correct thing to do! I'm thinking about trying Attribution Helper but we'll see.


Some Resources
- a blog post about Impact Posters from Keri-Lee Beasley
- a Flickr Group with great examples Great Quotes about Learning and Change

Some Examples