If you've been making things for your classroom or TpT for 5 minutes or longer I sure hope you know all about the fabulousness of Powerpoint! I have always used Word...not cute. That's all we will say about that. Enter Photoshop. One of my besties is a graphic design professor at USC. She is the ONLY reason I used it as long as I did. I used it more for scrapbooking than anything else but even that made me crazy and the learning curve is huge! Once I got serious about putting things on TpT I started nosing around to see what other teachers were using and I kept hearing people say POWER POINT ROCKS! I of course thought.HUH!?! What in the world? How are you using Power Point to bring groovy class stuff to life? So I started googling and you know it babeeee...it's the bomb!
I'm going to tell you a few of my fav features and then give you some great tutorials that have helped me bring PP to life! And remember, all of this came from some other brilliant person out there! :)
I love the ability to change fonts! And when I say change fonts I don't mean from one cute KG font to another! I mean I can take that baby and do all sorts of things to it!
This is just the beginning of the possibilities. Once you make a text box and type something, click on it and go up top to format. Click that and a new box of endless possibilities opens up!
I can move text around without having to say numerous bad words to my computer screen...like might have happened whilst using Word to create anything!
And my final thing I love about Power Point is backgrounds! I use to spend hours on photoshop making "paper". This filled my digi-scrapbooking needs but now I am always looking for backgrounds or "papers" to make cool backdrops for my blog posts and products. When I first started using PP, I was still searching for free papers or creating them in PSE and inserting them. And then I learned about backgrounds!
When you open up that presentation for the first time you click up top where it says background and start playing. You can add patterns with different colors and shapes. You can make solid backgrounds. You can make your page look like a chalkboard! So many amazing choices!
The biggest thing I would say is PLAY! Get in there and see what is possible and don't be afraid to make a mess! You can always hit that back arrow and get back to where you were and if you want to do it soon out there has done it already and a little googling will help you find their post about it!
Check out these links below for great ideas to make your PP Presentations come alive!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwdQEOmTA1w
http://www.ladybugsteacherfiles.com/2012/04/designing-printables-with-powerpoint.html
http://www.theschoolsupplyaddict.com/blog/category/video%20tutorial
Great tips!!
ReplyDeleteThanks Leslie!
DeleteGreat tips!!
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