We are all familiar with PowerPoint. I dare say that most of us in education have created our share of class presentations using the software because we felt like it provided everything we needed to produce a professional-looking presentation: word processing, outlining, drawing, graphing, and presentation management tools- all designed to be easy to use and learn. In addition to the PowerPoint slides, we could print audience handouts, outlines, and speaker's notes, but did you know that PowerPoint offers far more than that?
In this particular example, I used many different features of PowerPoint to create this "commercial" to reintroduce various Instructional Design LibGuides to the Walters State faculty. This was made with rectangles, trapezoids, shading, textures, etc. The red arrows are hyperlinked to different slides in the presentation. These hyperlinks create the illusion of going into a new room.
Powtoon is one of my favorite web tools, but several months ago, they started charging for characters, icons, etc. I decided to use PowerPoint to create a backdrop for my Powtoon. I created the backdrop for this particular movie with shapes, shading, and textures inside PowerPoint. I used the Snipping Tool to capture an image of the finished slide, dropped that into Powtoon as my backdrop, and as they say, "the rest is history." After getting my music and text like I wanted it in Powtoon, I published the finished project and uploaded it to my personal YouTube channel. Is it time consuming? Yes, but I enjoy the challenge of seeing if I can create what I can see in my mind.
