Familiar ground: presentation tools, but wait .. in the cloud? (Week 3)

I am the founder member of the PowerPoint fan club and love it to bits because it is so useful to me.

Every lesson I teach is anchored in PowerPoint. I use it as the place that holds my Learning Intentions, hyperlinks and flash animations (stolen from Boardworks), as well as 'ordinary' slides of text, graphs, images and data. Even the appearance of my individual PowerPoint based lessons acts as a sort of scheme of work. For sure I am 'one up' from those eijits that just chug through 20 slides of text. In particular the technique my colleague and I have developed of making storyboard worksheets using screen shots of flash animations is an important part of how we teach biology. I therefore would need quite some persuasion that other presentation tools could be part of my teaching life.

Looking on the e-Teaching Portal for Week 3 I discover a leaflet teaching me about Week 3 created in Smore, nice. I will use this one day. The items highlighted to us look fabulous, let me try a Prezi. I decided to make one for IGCSE Biology about 'Plasma, tissue fluid and lymph'

The students quite liked it, but I found a number of issues which put me off. Firstly I could not work out how to print slides off. Secondly I could only embed YouTube clips, I found it impossible to embed any animations. I tried to take screen shots from it, but they were too blurry. There is a slide sorter, but not much else in the way of features. I feel PowerPoint offers far more. In all, unless these problems can be resolved Prezi won't be the one for me.

I then decided to try Animoto. I made this one first 'The sample and not the stock' This one second 'Modelling the nerve impulse' I like this a great deal - but - unless I was happy to use just 7 images I cannot see much use for it. Maybe a starter activity of stimulation material? I think it could be more useful for students, for example, they could photograph stages of an experiment and then create a short Animoto record of what they did. Update on Animoto: our teacher pointed out to me that if I upgraded to free teacher status I would get more slides, I have done this and now must remember to use it!

So far I have not been brave enough to try any of the tools that involve my mug appearing in view, such as Screencast-O-Matic. I have signed up for Glogster and look forward to using that one, but could not quite 'suss' it out enough late on Sunday when I was trying to create my first Glog