Joyce, I have tried to view your enhanced powerpoint with two different browsers and it hangs up. I am interested in viewing the "souped" up speech. Can you repost?

Incredible, Joyce! I am stealing ... borrowing this to use in the US History class I teach. (All proper recognition will be retained.)

Excellent work as always Joyce, thank you for sharing it with us. It really gives me some ideas...

Makes you wonder, if Lincoln used social networks/text messaging what those conversations would look like...opens up other avenues too.

After they get the initial form of presentation down, it could be cool to teach them to splice a few pieces of audio appropriately to different slides to increase dramatic effect (it also provides audio variety to the audience), throw in some image generators, attach a historical character blog to it, and you've taught students not only about history, but made them give perspective and life to the people who lived through those times.

I love projects like this! It really brings history to life for the students instead of dry readings of it. Kudos.

Interesting ideas, Michael! I love the concepts of historical blogging and splicing additional audio ala Ken Burns. We did introduce images generators for the student projects. They love 'em.

And Kathy, I think you'll need QuickTime for this one. I will play with it once I get my copy of QuickTime Pro and then try to convert it into different formats.

Glad you like them :) Character blogging is something that I've been trying to flesh out on my own time so I can bring it to English teachers, but using historical figures works too. In a Gregory Maguire type of way, I find it interesting to think about what characters of all kinds were thinking or experiencing before significant moments. What were they like as people is the question I'd want students to address...it's very cool to step into someone else's shoes, that's why many of us read isn't it?

Hi Joyce,
I'm going to start convincing my teachers immediately. But for those of us who are still learning, how did you sync your PPT with the podcast? How did these two applications come together? Thanks!

Laura, I saved my PowerPoint as jpegs and dragged them into GarageBand. I recorded the music track using a copyright-friendly piece and recorded my voice as I pulled in the images.

Slideshare has that slidecast feature that lets you sync up one audio file with a slideshow.
<br>
I wonder if you could use audacity to split off parts of audio files and then recombine them into one file...I think audacity could also let you overlay an additional track recorded separately like voice. Then it'd be easy to sync up with slidecast. A lot of effort though, but very flexible. I'm going to give it a go and see what I can manage. Sorry I am anti-mac so I don't know what garage band can do, but the things I'd look for would be an mp3 splitter, joiner, and the ability to overlay tracks.

What I found to be very interesting was the notion of how to present things in PowerPoint. It is true that students sometimes like to go for super flashy instead of trying to focus on the facts and other students tend to the do the exact opposite. Growing up in the school system the relied heavily on student involvement, they always gave us options when it came to presenting projects. Commonly used was the PowerPoint slide. I agree though that over time these can become very boring and the use of them becomes common place instead of something special. Your comment about clip art made me laugh, considering the fact that it really isn’t that hard to go to Google and search images for what you are trying to represent (making sure to cite the website at the end of the presentation). I always watched classmates cram everything they were going to say into the PowerPoint as well, which made for a very boring lecture. We would furiously write down what was written on the slide and they would quickly go through them, driving the rest of us watching absolutely up a wall.
As a future educator, I want to provide my students the opportunity to use these sorts of tools (PowerPoint, pod casts, ect.) but I want to be able to challenge them to do something different with them. Your points will definitely be brought up in my classes when I begin teaching, with credit being given where it is due.

Raeanna Bauer

I am a Health Education Major at Illinois State University. I love the ideas you present in this post. I have been forced to make PowerPoints in my teaching classes that contain boring bullets and Google images. I see the same pictures on multiple powerpoints and find myself falling asleep during my peers and my own presentations. Students in my classes also still read off the powerpoint screen. At first, I was skeptical about your presentation by your initial description until I viewed it. I was shocked. I am not sold on all the new technology programs teachers are using in classes. Sometimes I feel they are unrefined and fail to actually help students learn. However, this powerpoint proved me wrong. The presentation was unique, effective, and engages the viewer. By incorporating technology with your own use of words, you created a great learning tool. I feel like this type of presentation may take some practice and trial and error before a newbie can perfect it, but has great potential for educators to engage learners. I will definitely used what you have taught me in this post along with learning on my own to attempt to create some similar presentations in my classes. Thankyou for sharing your knowledge with us. -Brandon