As a teacher with VBCPS, I am very familiar with Google Slides and Powerpoint as presentation tools. I was pleasantly pleased to find that most of the tools given to explore this week were just as easy to use as Google Slides. Here are my thoughts on four of the presentation tools in the module folder.

Haiku Deck: I did not play with this one very much because it wanted me to give my payment info to access the free trial. I clicked on teacher and student fees, hoping it would be free, but it also incurred a small fee after the free trial.

Prezi: This program looked exciting at first, but again, when I clicked on the free trial, it wanted my payment information for when the trial ended. Prezi did have a student or educator free account which was promising, but it was only the basic plan. With the basic plan you do not have access to privacy control, advanced image editing and other features. For those reasons, I didn’t choose to use this program for my presentation slides.

Genial.ly: This tool had a ton of different options besides presentations, which I found to be something I may introduce my own children to, but not really something I need at this time. These include social and personal branding and gamification. I did like that there were many different types of presentation templates, however, they weren’t organized in categories like Emaze.

Emaze: I chose to use Emaze for my presentation slides for a couple of reasons. First, it didn’t make me jump through hoops to check it out for free. It had an easy sign-in method of using Google Sign In or Facebook Sign In, which is awesome because you don’t have another password to worry about remembering. Second, I chose Emaze because it was simple to navigate. It has a lot of different templates for presentations that are organized in categories such as education, business,etc. It was a bit challenging to get familiar with the tool bars and find certain text features I needed, but after a bit of playing around, I was able to figure it out and move on to create my slides. You can click on the image at the top of this post to check out my presentation Literacy Activities For A Rainy Day.