Skip to main content

Week of PowerPoint (1) - The iPad App

PowerPoint: the go-to presentation tool in most classrooms. 

It’s a favourite with a lot of teachers, it does everything you need it to and it’s easy to use. Over the last year PowerPoint has undergone quite a few updates, and added in lots of new features to help in the classroom. In case you missed anything, this week I’m going to round up a few of my favourite additions in a blog post series ‘The Week of PowerPoint’. 

I’m going to kick off the series by introducing you to the PowerPoint iPad app. It’s been around a while and most of you will have it installed on your iPads - but do you use it? Granted, it’s difficult to build a whole presentation with text and images on the iPad version, however as a tool to just display presentations you already have, it’s definitely a game changer. 

When presenting a presentation from the iPad app you can use your finger as a pointer to focus on key areas, you can draw with your finger directly on the slides and navigate through your slides whilst standing anywhere in the room. 

Here’s how: 

1. Make sure you have the PowerPoint app installed on your iPad. You will also need to be set-up with AirServer so you can mirror what is on your iPad screen onto the big screen.  

2. Open a presentation you already have in the app. If you save all of your files in Google Drive, the easiest way to do this is by finding the file in the Drive app > open the options menu by clicking the three dots > Open in > Copy to PowerPoint. Once the presentation is open in the PowerPoint app, then save a copy to the iPad. 

3. Put your presentation into Presenter mode by clicking the Play button at the top or selecting Slide Show > From Start

4. To use the Pointer - simply press and hold on the screen to display the pointer and then move it around whilst pressing onscreen

5. To draw on the slide click along the top and select the Pen. You can also change the pen colour and size using the Pen Settings icon

6. To navigate through the slides simply press to the left or right of the screen
Labels:

Comments

Post a comment

Thank you for visiting our blog and leaving a comment. All comments have to be moderated before appearing on the live site.

Popular posts from this blog

Jamboard - New Tool

Jamboard has been around for a while as a high-end piece of digital office furniture from Google but the software is now part of G-Suite and therefore available to all dret.cloud users.

Staff or students can either go to jamboard.google.com for the web version (which is really only useful for viewing and sharing boards) or use the iOS app available on the Self-Service store.

What Jamboard provides is a lovely app to pull different kinds of documents from Google Drive or web pages, move and resize them and annotate over the top with different pen tools or a number of icons.

I plan to do a couple of blog posts about Jamboard in the coming days - one about the whole premise behind this kind of software and other comparing it to what up to now have been my go-to pieces of software, Google Keep and Microsoft OneNote.

If you'd like to see what Jamboard looks like in action, this (staged) teacher demonstration from Tom Mullaney gives a good overview.


Post a comment
Read more

Welcome to tips.dret.cloud

It's been a year since I started my role as an eLearning Lead with DRET, and what a year it's been! I've had the opportunity to lead on, and participate in, lots of training sessions, while visiting many classrooms and working with a host of talented teachers. It's incredible how you can show one example of how to use something new in the classroom, and subsequently see it being used and adapted a further dozen ways by different teachers. Throughout the year our team has been keeping notes on some of the best ideas we've come across, and we want to be able to share these ideas with everyone; thus, tips.dret.cloud was born.

tips.dret.cloud is essentially a scrapbook of ideas in one website. You can search for particular tools or areas of development you are interested in learning more about, and see how other teachers have used these tools to make a difference in their classrooms. There are also other resources, such as how-to guides, training videos, and useful lin…
Post a comment
Read more

Guest blog post - Pixi Maths

We recently started a new Spring cohort of our Challenge for eLearning CPD course with colleagues from the Corby area, including the author of Pixi Maths, Danielle Moosajee.
As a plenary activity for the first session, we used and demo'd Plickers - 'a simple tool that lets teachers collect real-time formative assessment data without the need for student devices.' It's a great tool which we've blogged about before, and here are Danielle's thoughts on it after using it class post-training:

I left the first Challenge 4 eLearning session full of biscuits and inspired! In a way, it was a shame that the Easter break fell so shortly afterwards as I was keen to try out some of the things we’d been introduced to.
A couple of years ago, a colleague had shown me the Plickers app. Students each receive a QR code with 4 orientations (A, B, C and D) and they hold their cards up to be scanned by an iPad in answer to a multiple choice question. Previously, I had laminated these …
Post a comment
Read more