Thursday, 6 December 2012

Fun with Powerpoint

Many of my colleagues are obsessed with students making powerpoint presentations whenever they go to the ICT rooms.

It's something all staff and students can do and it needs minimal supervision.

There is nothing wrong with this of course, but the problem is what to do with them once they are finished. 

You could put them on the class wiki/blog but you'd need to download each one separately to view them.

I decided therefore that it would be a jolly good wheeze to make Powerpoint presentations and make them into little cartoon strip style movies.

How do we do this?

Step one: Make a powerpoint

Step two: Instead of saving it as a powerpoint presentation save it as a series of jpeg files.

Step three: Go to a gif making website e.g. makeagif.com although other sites are available

Step four: Upload your jpegs and create an animated gif

Step five: Download the finished gif and put it on your wiki or blog

It can take fewer than 20 minutes to create something fairly good.

Like this:














UPDATE

As Clare Seccombe also pointed out, this can also be used as a stop/start animation tool.

I've done something like this in the past with my beginner German students.

It works like this: I give them a powerpoint. They fill in the blanks in German. Then they make it into a gif. Finally they use the ppt as a basic template to create their own.

This is the template made in to a gif:

2 comments:

Moodle Fairy said...

Guten Morgen! Just to say I really like this idea because of its simplicity. In the past I have done similar but got the pupils to put the jpgs into MovieMaker- but you are then relying on the pupils understanding or learning MM - this makes it much more straightforward. Next time, I will try your way :)

Dom said...

Hi Moodle Fairy,
thanks for the comment. I originally planned to do this as a MovieMaker exercise but my school's computers didn't have MM on them at the time. The advantage of MM, of course, is that you can add sound and make the clip as long as you like.
Dom.