Week of PowerPoint (3) - Professional looking presentations with ease

It’s been around for a while, but it’s a tool that I use all the time, especially when creating a new presentation from scratch. The Design feature in PowerPoint works in the background to match your content to professionally designed layouts, as you are putting your ideas onto a slide. As you start adding content such as pictures and charts, the designer will pop up to the right of the screen and show you different designs, that change as you start adding more. If you don’t see design ideas you may need to turn it on.

1. To turn on Designer go to the File menu, click Options.

2. In the PowerPoint Options dialog box, click the General tab on the left, then scroll toward the bottom and check the Automatically show me design ideas checkbox.

Once turned on, try adding some content to a page and see what happens.

Here are the type of designs the Design feature suggests from a blank slide with some text and a few images.

If you close the designer at any point you can always open it by selecting Design from the ribbon at the top and then Design Ideas. If you find that the designer can’t suggest anything for your slide it may be that there is too much content, or if you have drawings or videos on the page that it cannot incorporate into a design.

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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.

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…

OneNote and Google Drive in Harmony

Many of our staff use OneNote well and happily, as well as being a great place to keep everything for a topic in one place presented visually and annotated (in many ways better than with a specialist interactive board app) it is useful to share what you have had on the big screen with your class with a single link.

Most also use Google Drive as the main place they keep all their files to collaborate, share resources and work on them from anywhere.

When word reached us that Brendan Brannigan from Bringhurst Primary School had combined the two and now works on his OneNote files at home and school using Google Drive we asked to make a guide for colleagues - this video (also available on dret.tv, login required) is the result.

I must admit, after watching it I had a "why on earth hadn't I thought of this?" moment - there is absolutely nothing wrong with OneDrive which is where OneNote prefers to live, but it is one more thing to worry about.

Now all I have to do is work out…

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