While we had our first synchronous class last week, we all were discussing presentation skills and how to make a presentation the best that it can be. We covered the Do’s and Don’ts of presentations and public speaking. Eventually we got to multiple slides full of information to help us students prepare fabulous presentations in the future. These resources that were provided to us are great tools to help us all have great presentations. There were multiple resources that stuck out to me and that interested me, but for the sake of this blog I am only going to reflect on one of them.
The resource that I gravitated to is called Unsplash. This website is full of amazing photography that can be used on your slides or in presentations. The best part, the website is FREE to use. No sign up, no payments, no upgrade now to get the rest of the platform. This website has images of food to landscapes to animals. There is a search bar where you can search for what you want instead of looking through the categories on the home page. I know for myself; I love making slides colorful and pretty. I want my slides to stand out compared to others who just use a typical template version from either PowerPoint or Google Slides. As I am new to using Google Slides, I learned how to use an image for a background on a slide and I found that super awesome. So, bringing this back to Unsplash, I now have a resource where I can have multiple images to use for my future slides and even as backgrounds on those slides.
Recently in another class, we had to give a presentation on a lesson plan that we wrote. I chose to create my presentation on the Solar System for Fourth Grade students. Using my new found knowledge of using images as backgrounds, I proceeded to put every planet Image as the background of a slide in order to be able to give a few facts about each planet. I also included a slide for the sun and Pluto. I loved my presentation because it was creative and was not just a typical slide template. The struggle I did find with using images, finding the text and color that match well for every slide became difficult. I made it work and created a nice presentation on the Solar System.
Emily's Educational Thoughts 