Ned Potter, for the Schools Library Service, Suffolk| July 2014 Issuu version of this handout: http://bit.ly/1lvkjwp (case sensitive)
Finding fabulous images Below is a list of sites to search for images for your presentation. Note that with a lot of these sites there is a dotted line, above which are sponsored images from sites like shutterstock – we’re only interested in the free to use sites that appear BELOW the dotted-line:
We can use any images below this point
www.compfight.com searches Flickr better than Flickr searches itself. Make sure you choose the ‘Creative Commons’ option from the menu down the left which appears after your first search www.morguefile.com is not as macabre as its name suggest – it’s a brilliant resource for high quality professional images, licensed for commercial use (which means you can use them to promote events, for example, without worrying). http://commons.wikimedia.org/ - this resource has a huge array of photos and, unlike the others, these are nicely categorised so you can find what you need by more than just keyword searching.
Finally have a quick peak at www.photofunia.com – you can upload your own images into interesting contexts, giving you Photoshop-esque images without needing to actually master Photoshop. Find an interesting picture on Photofunia (obviously all the pictures of faces are out, but the Billboards and posters work really well) and upload your new pic into it. You may need to experiment to get one the right shape and proportions.
A note on using Creative Commons Images Most of the places to find images listed here are sites where you can find pictures made available under a Creative Commons licence – in other words, you’re free to use them, subject to certain conditions depending on the type of licence. A feature of all Creative Commons licences is the need to attribute the author – to say where you found the picture and who it’s by. When you come to this in ‘real life’ rather than as part of an exercise, it’s essential to make a note of every URL for every image you use AS YOU GO ALONG! Just pasting in images and then trying to attribute retrospectively saves time initially but is inevitably a nightmare in the longrun… Note also that a Creative Commons licence is granted in perpetuity. So if you find a CC image, you can use it forever – the author can’t later change it to be a fully copyright-restricted image retrospectively.
Exercise: Creating full-image slides
We’ll be doing this exercise when the slide above is on the screen. The object is just to experiment and try things out, not create the world’s greatest presentation! You can create a presentation on whatever you like, but if you’re lacking inspiration, here is a very basic presentation, 5 slides long, with words for you to insert over the images you find.
Slide 1: Welcome to the Learning Resources Centre [plus your name, and the name of your school] Slide 2: We aim to provide inspiration and support for all our students Slide 3: We have more than just books… Slide 4: Let us help you get the most out of the new technology Slide 5: Any questions, just ask
Method One uses full-screen background images and has two parts: the background image, and the text box. The background image needs to be full-screen most of the time, and the text box works best when it contains one or two key sentences, and is semi-transparent. Here’s how to do this: 1. Go to www.compfight.com or www.morguefile.com (or your own school site) and search for some nice images to suit the subject matter of the PowerPoint. 2. Landscape-orientated oblong images work best – you want the background images to be roughly the same shape as the slide itself, for obvious reasons. A Powerpoint slide is 1024 x 768 pixels so anything in the zone will be fine – if it gets below around 750 pixels wide it might become blurry when up-sized to fit the entire slide. 3. We’re going to do things as straightforwardly as possible, so, once you find an image you like, don’t save it to your PC – just Copy it (select it and Control-C, or right-click over it and choose Copy) 4. Then go back to your presentation, and right-click on the slide itself. From the menu which appears, choose ‘Format background’ 5. Choose Picture or Texture Fill, then > (Insert from) Clipboard. And there you go – your slide will now be entirely taken up with the image. If you’re using the OU template, the image will appear nicely ‘behind’ the elements of the template. 6. Next step is to add some words – from the toolbar along the top choose Insert > Text Box 7. Draw your box in the least busy part of the image. A thin box all the way across the slide works well, but you can do whatever looks good 8. You now need to fill the box so you can easily read what you’re about to write in it. Right click over the box, choose Format Shape, then go to Fill – you want a Solid (rather than textured) Fill. Black or white often works best. 9. It’s now time to write in the box – put in your sentence or two, in a nice font, and if the colour picks out a hue from the background image, so much the better. Minimum size 24, don’t forget. 10. Finally, make the text box semi-transparent. What you’re aiming for is to be able to easily read the sentence, but still see some of the background image through the text box. Once again you need to right-click on the box, click Format Shape, then slide the Transparency slider for your Solid Fill. Experiment with different percentages; 30-40% often works well. That’s it! Hopefully you should now have a visual feast which conveys a clear message. This style of presentation works very well as stand-alone online multimedia, as well as in a live presentation situation. Remember - each slide should a) convey the key message for the point you want to make and b) remind you of what you need to say out loud… You don’t need everything in every slide – leave out any extraneous info. You may end up with more slides, if you make one point per slide – this doesn’t mean the presentation will take longer! You will still go through the information at the same pace.
When this slide is on screen, we’ll be doing:
Exercise: PowerPoint Mastery
With Method Three there are no step-by-step because it’s a blank canvas, and every presentation is constructed differently. Instead this hand-out focuses on different techniques which are useful here.
Sometimes you find the perfect image, but it’s Portrait rather than Landscape in orientation. You can still use it – Copy it as before, then Paste it onto your slide (rather than setting it as the background). You may want to Crop away everything but the most important part of the image. Then place the image at the extreme left or right of the screen, and write on the rest of the slide. This can either be the default white (with a text colour to match the picture in some way) or you can Right-Click the slide, choose Format Background, and fill it black. Find an image from any of the sources listed above and try this out.
www.freeimages.com (formerly stock.xchng) tends to have brilliant ‘transparent’ images – by which I mean pictures on perfectly white backgrounds, so that if you put them on a white slide there’s no obvious divide where the picture ends and the background begins. NB not all images on the site are transparent, it just has more of them than most. Try searching stock.xchng for tree, or book, or notepad, or whatever else takes your fancy. Find a transparent image, copy the image, paste it onto your slide and write on the rest of the slide.
The other brilliant way to find images to match a colour theme is via the Colour Search Engine (http://labs.tineye.com/multicolr). Choose two or more colours based on your theme, and see what you can find to support what you want to say in your slides. When you find an image, left-click on it and you’ll be taken to the original image on Flickr. Flickr keeps changing what you need to do next, but at the time of writing (May 7 th!) you then need to right-click and choose a size (remember, close to 1000px is good), and THEN right-click on the image that appears in order to either copy it (to paste it into your slide) or save it (to upload into your slide).
Try recolouring an image to suit your theme. Find an image you like, then Right-click and Format Picture. Choose Picture Color, then ReColor and experiment with different options. By default the results may look slightly tepid, in which experiment with decreasing the balance and increasing the contrast (or vice versa) to make a more dramatic edit.
Finally, sometimes you want an entire image or block of text to be a link. You can format any object in PowerPoint to be a clickable link, by right-clicking on it and pressing ‘Hyperlink…’. If you wish to make part of a slide clickable, just draw a text box over the relevant section, don’t write any text in it, then right-click and add the hyperlink.
The basics of Prezi The basic principle of Prezi is to put objects on the canvas and link them together with a ‘path’. Your presentation will then consist of Prezi moving from object to object, zooming in on them in the order you’ve chosen. Objects can be text boxes, images, YouTube videos or graphics. You can write and structure your presentation exactly as you would a PowerPoint, or you can do something completely different, like a map. Just click on the canvas anywhere to start adding stuff. A typical process of creating a Prezi might consist of these stages: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Plan the structure and outline of the presentation Add the text, plus any images / videos etc Move them around and arrange them in a coherent order on the canvas Plot the path between them in the order you want to use Click ‘Presentation’ and watch the presentation back, then refine it if you need to
Key tips to remember
Keep in mind that because you can make objects big and small, you’ll need to be zooming in and out to move around the canvas and see what you’re doing. The scroll-wheel on the mouse is the easiest way to zoom out and zoom back in again. To move an object around, click on it to pick it up (more on this below). To move around the canvas, click and hold anywhere there ISN’T an object, and move the mouse up, down, left and right to move around. You can change the shape of the Text boxes you create with the little two-way arrow icon on tnhe right edge of the box, as shown below
Click the little Pencil icon near the top left of the screen to enter the edit mode for your Path. This is where you choose which order your Prezi will zoom in on the various pieces of text, graphics and images in your presentation.
Getting started: signing up for a Prezi account 1. If you’ve not already signed up for a Prezi account, go to www.prezi.com 2. Click the blue ‘Get started’ button near the bottom of the page 3. You will be presented with various options via the ‘How would you like to use Prezi?’ page. We want the Students & Teachers sign up, hidden away at the bottom of the page:
4. The paid for options are unnecessary – click the green Continue button under the ‘Edu Enjoy’ license
5. Sign up with your school email address as prompted.
Exercise: Recreating the Web 2.0 Tools Prezi Presentation To get you used to the way Prezi works, this guide will take you through building a presentation step by step. If you’d rather not do this, and create your own presentation from scratch, feel free – skip to page 12, near the back, for guidance on how to start creating.
View the original Web 2.0 Tools presentation, which you’ll be creating your own version of, at http://bit.ly/trainingprezi - note this is case-sensitive link. It may be useful to have this open in a separate tab so it’s easy to refer to.
1. Go back to prezi.com if you’re not already there, and click the blue New Prezi button, in the topright corner of the screen. 2. When the Prezi opens, you get the choice to choose a template or create an entirely blank canvas. The screen will look something like this:
3. For the purposes of this exercise we’re using the ‘Social Network’ template – click on this then click the Use template button. (By default Prezi offers you the Latest templates, but these aren’t necessarily the best ones. When you come to explore Prezi more fully in your own time, click More just under ‘Choose your template’ and scroll down to find some interesting ones.)
4. You’ve now opened the blank template; your screen should look like this:
The first thing to do is edit the title and sub title. Click on each, and edit the main title to read ‘Web 2.0 Tools’ and the subtitle to read ‘In Education’.
(In all cases in these instructions, the suggested text to type in is just to give you something to work with rather than you having to create your own content AND get used to a new tool at the same time – if you’d rather write something else entirely, that’s completely fine.)
5. There are two main ways to navigate around your Prezi. The first is by clicking on things on the main screen, or zooming in and out using the mouse wheel; the second is by clicking on each screen in the ‘Path’ down the left hand side. This will then make the main screen zoom in on each object on the path. We’re going to use this method as it’s slightly more straightforward when working with an existing template.
Click on point 2 on the Path. The main screen will then zoom in on the box at point 2, like this:
6. We’re keeping things simple for this exercise, so all the boxes in this presentation look the same and work in the same way. Click the various sections of text to edit them, and click the image to choose a new picture.
For this box, change the title to ‘Welcome’, the main text to ‘This is a brief introduction to a few useful online tools in the education environment.’ And the picture caption to ‘Web 2.0’.
7. Click the Replace Image button on the picture. You can either upload a file from your desktop, or choose an image to import from Google images. If you type ‘Web 2’ into the Google search box, the second image that comes up is a good fit for our image box – but use whatever you like. Double click an image and it will replace the mountain scene currently in the Prezi.
8. We’re now going to follow the same process for the remaining boxes. In each case, click on the next path point down on the left hand side of the screen (so number 3 next in this case) and then edit the title text, the body text, and replace the image with something more relevant by searching for a keyword (e.g. ‘Prezi’ to find the Prezi logo to put in box 3).
If you want to recreate the presentation exactly, the text used for each section is as follows:
Box 3: Prezi The first tool is Prezi itself. Prezi allows for audience led, interactive presentations. Viewers can also comment on Prezis, and authors can reply.
Box 4: Twitter The next tool is Twitter, a platform for exchanging views, links, and images. Twitter is a bit like the useful conversation between presentations at conferences, but all the time. It is increasingly becoming part of academic life.
Box 5: LinkedIn LinkedIn is a potentially useful platform on which to display your CV, list of publications and presentations, and to attract offers of work or collaboration.
Box 6: Academia.edu Academia.edu is a social / professional network aimed specifically at those in higher education. It allows you to upload e-copies of your articles, and approach authors and scholars directly to interact with them.
Box 7: Slideshare.net Perhaps the most under-rated web 2.0 tool in the academic sphere is Slideshare. This platform is to PowerPoint presentations what YouTube is to video - people all over the world upload their conference talks and gain a global audience. Thousands of people view the top presentations on Slideshare.
Box 8: Thanks for watching [On this screen, put in a link to your library web-page, or anything else you like, here. For the picture, type your own name into the image search - you may be (uncomfortably) surprised at how many images of you are available via Google...]
9. Finally, click the Customise button from the toolbar along the top so you can see how changing colours and fonts works on Prezi – you can change most things about the way your presentation looks all at once by choosing a new theme. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend doing this with the Web 2.0 Tools presentation, but you can always choose another theme then hit the Undo button once you’ve had a look at it.
10. The presentation is now complete – all that remains is to watch it back. Press the blue Present button in the top right hand corner of the screen, then use the arrow keys to navigate through the presentation. Note that Prezi auto-saves, and when you hit the Exit button you’ll be able to edit the name and description of your presentation. You can also delete it when you want to.
Good luck! Read the next few pages to get an overview of how Prezi works, and how you can manipulate and play around with your slides….
A general guide to creating Prezis from scratch To type Click anywhere on the canvas to start typing. Previously you had to stick to the font colours chosen using the Colours and Fonts section, but now you can edit the colour of any given block of text using the little colour box. You can also justify right, left or centre, or use bullet points, and make text bold etc. To insert images etc, use the toolbar.
The Prezi toolbar On the far-left of the toolbar are the options save, undo and redo. You may end up using redo a lot! On the right are the options to view the Prezi in Present mode, to save the presentation as a PDF, to change the screen ratio, to turn on the help mode, and to exit.
In the middle are the Insert button and the Customise button. They’re both very important.
Insert allows you to put in frames, arrows, symbols and shapes to give your Prezi visual structure, plus add multimedia like images, videos, music or narration. You can even import and edit a PowerPoint presentation here.
The Customise button is used to decide the overall look and feel of the Prezi. It’s best to decide this at the start, rather than changing it later. Don’t be afraid to use the ‘Customise Current Theme’ option at the bottom, to get the Prezi exactly how you want it.
Manipulating objects on Prezi
Final Prezi tips
Hidden Frames are the key to a really good Prezi. They allow you to make any area of the Prezi a clickable area to zoom in on (rather than having to rely on zooming in on a specific object) and they allow you to display text and image together in one view. Normal frames (rather than hidden frames) accomplish the same thing, but it often looks better when hidden frames are used. To put in a Hidden Frame, go to Frames and then Hidden Frame, then use the mouse to draw the box in the size you want. Hold down shift to maintain a 4:3 aspect ratio.
Perhaps the most important aspect of creating a Prezi is avoiding motion-sickness in the viewer – if the presentation lurches about in such a way as to make people feel ill, it doesn’t matter how amazing the content is. Position items sympathetically (so the view moves logically, from left-toright or top-to-bottom) and move between them evenly; avoid an over-reliance on dramatic swoops and only change perspective and swing round the bare minimum of times. Also, pace your Prezi much like you would a PowerPoint – lingering on each screen for a little while is a good way to ensure the presentation doesn’t whizz around too much.
You can save Prezis to a memory stick even without the Edu Enjoy subscription. I’d recommend doing this for all presentations, so you’re not reliant on the internet working and Prezi being okay (it does go down occasionally).
Try http://issuu.com to make PDFs interactive and interesting. Try www.padlet.com to get student feedback and ideas as part of a session Try www.canva.com or www.haikudeck.com to create visually stunning presentations from set templates – less customisable, but less work and no design skills needed…
Feel free to email me: ned.potter@york.ac.uk. I’m on Twitter: @theREALwikiman. My website, which has plenty of Prezis on and advice on how to use it, is at www.thewikiman.org. If you’re interested in more guides to Prezi, I’ve put a list of all the stuff I’ve written, in one place here: http://www.librarymarketingtoolkit.com/2013/06/prezi-fromstart-to-finish-complete-set.html. The only thing this doesn’t have is my most recent post about importing your floor plans to create an interactive map: http://thewikiman.org/blog/?p=2419