Making Class Presentations / Notes Easier with Keynote!

As teachers, we spend a lot of our time thinking about how to "get away from the front of the room" and have students spend class time working in small groups or independently. No one wants to hear themselves talk for 90 minutes straight.  On the other hand, there are still things we want to "present" to students--whether that's startups and agendas for the day, media, or giving notes / interactive lecture.  This for many of us means at least some use of slides.  I grew up on PowerPoint (both as a student and as a beginning teacher), and I love the easy sharing and collaboration features of Google Slides. Over the past few years, however, whenever I had a presentation that absolutely had to be great--whether that means a particularly complex topic introduction for students, or Professional Development for teachers--I used Apple's Keynote.

Now, I'm sure some of you are thinking, "I'm not super-interested in learning a new presentation app right now. This doesn't seem like something that can help my teaching."  I thought exactly the same thing, but now I use keynote for almost everything.

In the interest of being brief, I'm going to omit some killer features of Keynote for now--will follow up with next blog post.

Awesome Keynote Features that didn't even make this blog 
(links to resources if you're interested)
1. You can narrate your slides and export as video podcast in one click!
2. Keynote is so much better with multimedia (video, pdf) than ppt or Google Slides
3. Magic Move. Absolutely incredible tool--and very easy to use.


Okay, if you're still reading, here are some features of keynote that you can use immediately in your teaching.  I'm showing screenshots on the iPad, but I highly recommend downloading keynote for iOS and from the Mac App Store. This way, you get to take advantage of the first cool feature of keynote...a Apple calls it "handoff." What this essentially means is that anything you make in keynote shows up both on your Mac and your iPad. If you're on the same wifi network while you're working, you can even go straight from iPad to the Mac, and when you open your slideshow on the Mac, it will take you to the slide you were just working on. The screenshot below is my keynote home screen on the iPad--it shows me all my presentations, regardless of where I created them or last worked on them. This backup and sync is all done behind the scenes with iCloud, so I never have to think about it.

So as I said, there are lots of great features about keynote that allow you to make presentations that are (in my opinion) prettier and better-designed than PowerPoint or google slides. It's also great to drag and drop media. Not just images, but also video and pdf. You can actually drag and drop a pdf of a worksheet onto a slide if you want to emphasize some part of it.

Once you've made your slides (or imported them from PowerPoint or other slides), the presentation tools of keynote can really shine. To do this, you use your laptop to present your slides at the front of the room, but you can use your iPad as a remote! If you're interested in the details of this setup, please come see us at the DTC desk--setup takes less than 5 minutes.

IPad Presentation remote! Annotating slides and the laser pointer
 

When you're using your iPad as a presentation remote, it gets you out of the front of the room. Now you can be roaming and helping students with their work, you can be checking in on what they're doing...not only is this a nice no confrontational use of proximity to cut down on Madden Football, but it also gets you out of the front of the room.

I've found that the simple switch of presenting from the back of the room helps to get more student voice in the room. I've already set the agenda for discussion by making my slides and choosing the data / artifacts that students are reacting to--I don't always want them looking at me for answers and commentary on top of that. If I present from the back of the room, even if I'm talking, we're all literally pointed in the same direction, looking at the slide from the same perspective.

[side note: when I looked at my slides from the back of the room, it changed some of my style choices--some text and diagrams that looked fine to me from the front of the room looked small or confusing from the back.]

Pad Presentation remote! Getting your presenter notes off the slides

So PowerPoint, Google slides, and keynote all have the presenter notes feature. We've all been to presentations (I've given some) where the presenter was reading their slides to the audience. When I show things to students, I certainly want to keep my notes about that meager ill, but I don't want to clutter my slides with it. The presenter notes feature shows your current slide and your notes on the points you want to make, so your students can be fully focused on the image, clip, or data you want to show them, rather than sharing that space with bullets for your notes.

Anyway, as Second Semester starts, if you want to shake things up a bit in your class, give Keynote a try!as always, we'd love to hear your thoughts--do you like this? Are there other features you like using? What else can we help with? Love to hear more...and next time, I'll talk about how you can use this tool to make video podcasts from your laptop!