So, one component of the 7th grade science fair is for the students to create a PowerPoint presentation. In doing so, we discussed some techniques and tools for making effective presentations. One of these included creating a presentation that speaks to your audience. To that end, I gave them the challenge that their audience was the entire school community, therefore including a range of people from those who could not read yet (4 and 5 year olds) to those who could be their grandparents.
Creating a PowerPoint that would speak to the latter, was not too challenging - they could mostly go with what they know and use a combination of text and pictures from the internet. Speaking to the Kindergarten aged child was hard. So, I asked them to create a picture that captured the essence of their science experiment so that when they came to that slide, the Kindergarten student would be interested in learning about the picture.
We used Ink Art and the tablets to create the pictures. These were then exported as a JPG file and inserted into the PowerPoint presentation. I was really pleased with the results and the PowerPoint presentations are so much more interesting now. I am looking forward to the night of the science fair to see how it goes over.
Comments
I love this idea. I stole part of it to get my computer class kids to create an animation in PowerPoint that would accomplish more than just flashing zooming in of text. They created an animated illustration of their hypothesis. Some were easier than others but all caused some logical thinking and creativity.