Navitar Nibbles at PowerPoint

Now I love a well-made Prezi presentation as much as the next fluffball, but when it comes to practicality, you can’t beat PowerPoint for helping with little classroom tips and tasks. You don’t need a login or internet connection, you can keep it private or upload to Slideshare, and you don’t need to be a creative genius (thank goodness!) to fill those inviting little oblongs with fun stuff! Just make sure you don't OVER-fill them with boring sentences you don't need.

I’ve made a handful of screencasts to accompany some classroom ideas for PowerPoint, which you can find on www.screenr.com/user/Navitar. They’re pretty simple things like inserting speech bubbles to make a handy cut-up you can use for warmers or playing with the timer and animation/reveal function to jazz up a gapfill or revision game (not all my own ideas originally - I 'crowdsourced' them!). You probably know how to do most of them already (well done you!) - maybe help out a fluffy friend if you do!



Sometimes talking face to face is still best :-)

What I found most interesting was that although PowerPoint is meant for presentations, it’s actually really useful for things that are not presentations! After all, English teachers don’t do much presenting but they do use lots of things like visuals and timed activities to keep students interested and get them to practise language in the classroom.
Want to make your own screencasts? I used Screenr.com which is free and you can sign in with a Twitter account or Facebook (you can see my Screenr account at www.screenr.com/user/Navitar). Best thing? You can download the screen recording as an MP4 video when you’re done – which means you can use it anywhere! More on working with audio and video soon I hope…