Thing 8: Share your slide decks, photos, or presentation slides

I used Zoho Show to embed one of my PowerPoint presentations that I created this spring for my class. The presentation was used to review Mendel's experiment with peas, in this case showing the seed color trait, and also to introduce the concept of punnett squares. I imported an existing PowerPoint into Zoho, which I did not see as an option on any of the other sites. One thing I did not like about Zoho is that I was unable to figure out how to do what PowerPoint calls "animations", having things appear on the slide when you want them to. In this presentation, in particular, those are extremely important. When I present the first slide in class, it starts out with just the original set of pea plants at the top of the slide. As we click through the presentation, students think through where the genetic material for each successive generation comes from, illustrated by arrows and new plants filling into the slide. Without those, students would be totally overwhelmed with the amount of information and would probably zone out. Giving them all of the imformation up front conflicts with the inquiry theme of our Science curriculum and eliminates the opportunity for students to figure it out themselves, thus gaining confidence in the material. I do like the idea of creating and saving presentations online. It would eliminate the need for jump drives and the problems of having multiple versions in multiple locations and not being able to remember which one was last updated.

I created this filmstrip of the 2007 Gopher Football Season using Picturetrail. I found Picture Trail to be fun and easy to use. I liked it better than Flickr. I would definitely use Picturetrail for my personal use. It lets you be much more creative with your photos, something the scrapbooker in me appreciates! I think I could use this as a teacher tool, too. I show my students a lot of pictures of different scientists, landforms, genetic traits, etc. In the past, I have cut and paste the photos into PowerPoint slides, but think that creating a "Flick" with Picturetrail would be more interesting and better hold students' attention. Another feature of PictureTrail that I liked was that you could easily add captions to the photos. Adding captions in PowerPoint requries inserting textboxes, and making sure the font is the same on each slide, which is a time consuming process. With a Picturetrail "Flick" you can label all of your photos in one place in under a minute, or use the captions to add the words to your favorite fight song! :)

I made two attempts to create a database on Lazybase which would hold data about sceintists - date of birth, family background, date of death, scientific discoveries, impact on society - all the required information for the Scientist Project students complete in my class. I thought it would be great for me to have all of the required informaton about the scinetists commonly chosen in one place because I cannot memorize it all, and often find myself googling scientist while correcting projects. Unfortunately, I found Lazybase to be pretty frustrating and not intuitive. I couldn't find any sort of help documentation, and gave up after about 1.5 hours so don't have anything to post here for you to see. Is there a better tool for this?