Animated whiteboard presentations

This is my first attempt , so go easy on me. I wanted to show you how easy this app is to use. It’s a paid app called Elevator Pitch. It cost about 2.40 AUD. It is not a top of the range whiteboard animation app for scribing like VideoScribe. The latter comes with all the bells and whistles and runs on a computer or a tablet. Elevator Pitch is for the iPad and I can see some people would be able to use their iPhones to produce animated whiteboard presentations.It’s an entry level app for visual outlining. I was up and running in a couple of minutes.The time line at the bottom is very easy to follow and you can swap the elements around if you want to. You can add your own images, use supplied clip art and then you type in the text and choose the presentation styles. It has no sound element which does not worry me at all. I am a beginner at this animated whiteboard presentation skill and I shall need to progress in my own way.Not having sound means I don’t have to worry about it while I am getting the text and visual elements in place.  The little video you make saves to the camera roll on the iPad and then I saved that to Dropbox. It saves as a .mov so it can be imported into a video programme for enhancement, sound, other added video elements. I put my presentation into Movie Maker because it is very quick to make a presentation. This one is just to start the year in my classes and get students who have done French before to introduce themselves quickly. More fun than writing a list of expressions on the board. I can show my video and then we can do a bit of  practice. The movie I made with Elevator Pitch itself lasts 20 seconds and is on my iPad, so if ever I want to do a quick refresher of the expressions in class all I have to do is go to my camera roll. This is going to be a great way for me to cover basic expressions and language patterns and quickly revise things we have learned. The only downside was that it appears to have no support for accented characters. Not even if I used the French keyboard.

Presentation power

I met PowToon today , thanks to one of my year 8s. For the junior students for homework I set a research project which is broken down into weekly tasks and then they book in to present it to the class on the whiteboard. My classes are around 30 students and they learn very quickly they need to do something different or 30 presentations can really go on and on and on. Each time we do them we look at how we can do better next time. Today , they came up with 3 Powerpoint slides full of good presentation tips because the presentations we saw today were in a league of their own. Students had really gathered momentum and confidence with their presentation skills and they were all really interesting. The feedback I get is students really like to do this and they really enjoy having homework like this where they get to discover things for themselves. Past the Term One presentation the weekly tasks are optional. If they can think of something better to do that week, they can. After the first one they understand the process and then what happens if they come in and they are not properly prepared. I also allow them to choose how they are going to present after we have done the first one. The first one is a slide presentation. After that they can choose for themselves how to present on the board. As I explain to them, it gives me a chance to see what they can do and it gives them a chance to try things out they might think are a good idea. There are no penalty points if it goes a bit wrong because they took a risk as long as they have met the criteria of the assessment task. Today we sat through a charming PowToon presentation which the student had embedded into a PowerPoint presentation. It was interesting, dynamic and really, really good. It had such a complexity and then a strong narrative. The liveliness of it captured our attention and so 30 people sat and watched mesmerised and the student was rewarded with a big clap at the end. The presentation benchmark has now been lifted. I  shared PowToon with the year 9s this afternoon and said they had 10 minutes to have a look at it. Many explored it for the full time I gave them and were totally engrossed. It is not just for students, though. Teachers could use it for some really good content delivery…note to self.

There is a good review of PowToon here.