How to Use SVG Files in PowerPoint

Last week a reader reached out to me for advice about how to design slides and PDFs so that the images in them didn't get grainy-looking when they were enlarged. The solution that immediately came to my mind was to use SVG files whenever possible instead of JPG or PNG files. SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphic. 

An SVG won't get grainy when it is enlarged for use on a slide or PDF. In the video that is embedded below I demonstrate how to use SVG files in PowerPoint and Canva. In the video I also show a couple of places to find SVG files. 

Video - How to Use SVG Files in PowerPoint

10 Tools for Gathering Real-time Feedback From Students

Chat tools and polling services provide good ways to hear from all of the students in a classroom. These kinds of tools, often referred to as backchannel tools, allow shy students to ask questions and share comments. For your more outspoken students who want to comment on everything, a feedback mechanism provides a good outlet for them too. Over the years I've used a variety of feedback tools in my classroom. This is my updated list of backchannel and informal assessment tools for gathering real-time feedback from students.

Classroomscreen is a service that lets you create a homescreen on which you can place reusable countdown timers, stopwatches, polls, noise meters, random name selectors, and more helpful classroom management tools. With the polling tool in Classroomscreen you can display a question for your students and have them respond with a multiple choice selection or by choosing a smiley face. See my screenshot below for more details. 

Yo Teach! lets you create online backchannel spaces to facilitate discussions. To get started on Yo Teach! simply go to the site and name your room. You can get started by just doing those two steps, but I would recommend taking a another minute to scroll down the Yo Teach! site to activate the admin function, the password function, and to select "avoid search."  The "avoid search" option will hide your room from search results so that people cannot find it without being given its direct URL. The password function lets you set a password that must be entered before students can participate in the chat. The admin features of Yo Teach! let you mute or remove students from a discussion, delete your room, and view statistic about the usage of your room. The admin function that reveals statistics will show the names of participants and how active they have been in your Yo Teach! room. Here's a video overview of Yo Teach!

ClassPoint. It's a great little tool that you can use to build interactive quizzes and polls into your PowerPoint presentations. You can also use it to annotate slides, create whiteboards on the fly, and share your annotations with students. In this short video I provide a demonstration of how ClassPoint works. The video shows a teacher's perspective and a student's perspective of how ClassPoint can be used in your classroom. 

Ziplet is a service for gathering feedback from your students in a variety of ways. The simplest way is to create an exit ticket by using one of the dozens of pre-written questions provided by Ziplet. Ziplet does not require students to have accounts to respond to exit ticket questions. Students can simply enter an exit ticket code that you give to them before they answer the question. What Ziplet offers that is somewhat unique is the option to respond directly to individual students even when they are responding to a group survey. The purpose of that feature is to make it easy to ask follow-up questions or to give encouragement to students based on their responses to a question posed to the whole group. Here's a short video about how to use Ziplet.

Plickers is a great student response system for classrooms that aren't 1:1 or for anyone who would rather not have to go through the trouble of trying to get all students onto the same webpage or chatroom at the beginning of a lesson. Plickers uses a teacher's iPad or Android tablet in conjunction with a series of QR codes to create a student response system. Students are given a set of QR codes on large index cards. The codes are assigned to students. Each code card can be turned in four orientations. Each orientation provides a different answer. When the teacher is ready to collect data, he or she uses the Plickers mobile app to scan the cards to see a bar graph of responses. Click here for three ideas for using Plickers in your classroom.

Mentimeter is an audience response tool lets you create polls and quizzes for your audience to respond to during your presentations. Responses to open-ended poll questions can be displayed as a word cloud, but there isn't a true chat function in Mentimeter. You can create and display polls and quizzes from the Mentimeter website or you can use their PowerPoint Add-in to display your polls and quizzes from your slideshow. Your audience members can respond from their phones, tablets, or laptops.

The Q&A function built into the presentation mode of Google Slides is a good option for gathering questions from students when they are viewing slides that you or their classmates present. Likewise, posting a simple question in Google Classroom is a good way to quickly get a sense of what your students know about a topic before you begin a lesson or what they think was important in a lesson that you just taught. 

Poll Everywhere is a service that allows you to collect responses from an audience via text messaging. The free plan for K-12 educators provides selection of features and quantity of responses that is adequate for almost any classroom. One of the neat ways to display feedback gathered through Poll Everywhere is in word clouds. 

I've been using Padlet since it was called WallWisher back in 2009. Padlet enables me to have students not only share exit responses as text, but to also share exit responses as hyperlinks. For example, if my students have been working on research projects I will ask them to share a link to something they found that day along with an explanation of how it is relevant to their research.

Formative provides you with a place to create online assignments that your students can respond to in class or out of class. Assignments can be as simple as one question exit tickets like "what did you learn today?" to complex quizzes that use a combination of multiple choice, short answer, and true/false questions. You can assign point values to questions or leave them as ungraded questions. The best feature of Formative is the option to create "show your work" questions. "Show your work" questions enables students to draw responses and or upload pictures as responses to your questions. When you use this question type students will see a blank canvas directly below the question. On that canvas they can draw and or type responses.

Dozens of PowerPoint Tips & Tricks

On Saturday I shared my playlist of Google Slides tutorials. This morning I have a PowerPoint tips playlist to share with you. Over the years I haven't made nearly as many PowerPoint tutorial videos as I have Google Slides tutorial videos. That said, my PowerPoint tips playlist still includes more than two dozen tutorials. 

Some of the highlights from the playlist are featured below. 

Create a storyboard template in PowerPoint



How to Remove Image Backgrounds in PowerPoint



How to Add a Timer to Your PowerPoint Slides



How to Enable Automatic Captioning of PowerPoint Presentations



How to Add & Edit Alt Text in PowerPoint Presentations

Slideator - Add Your Voice to Almost Any Type of Slideshow

Slideator is a free tool that you can use to add voice-over and webcam recordings to your slides. Slideator works with just about any type of slideshow that you own. You can even use it with a set of slides that you have in PDF. In addition to adding your voice-over and webcam recording to your slides, Slideator lets you draw, type, and highlight on your slides.

To use Slideator simply upload your slides in whatever format they are currently in. Then you can record a voice-over with or without your webcam turned on. When you have finished recording on Slideator you can share it publicly or keep it unlisted and only share it with a small audience. Watch the short video that I have embedded below to see how Slideator works. 

Applications for Education
Slideator provides an easy way to turn an existing set of your slides into a short video lesson to share with your students. You can do similar things with some of the tools built into PowerPoint, Keynote, and Canva. The nice thing about Slideator is that it provides the recording and hosting tools in one place so that you don't have to record and then upload the video to another site.

How to Create Image Revealing Effects in PowerPoint

On Wednesday I published a short video about how to create image revealing effects in Google Slides. Shortly afterwards a viewer emailed me with a question about doing something similar in PowerPoint. I was happy to help by recording this new video to demonstrate how to create image revealing effects in PowerPoint. 

Creating an image revealing effect in PowerPoint is basically a matter of layering images then using the animation tools to set the sequence in which an image is removed from a slide when it is clicked. Watch the video that is embedded below to see how that's done.

Video - How to Create Image Revealing Effects in PowerPoint

Applications for Education

Using the image revealing effect could be a good way to create a series of quiz game slides. On each slide you can have a question for which the answer is hidden until you click on the slide to reveal the answer. That could be a fun way to host an in-classroom review game that is kind of like Jeopardy.

Tools for Translating Live Presentations

Last week a reader emailed me to ask the following question:

Do you have any recommendations for a live translation during a keynote address or conference? For example, if the speaker is doing their presentation in English but we have Spanish speakers in the audience. They can follow along by reading the Spanish on a projection screen as the presenter is talking in English.

As soon as I read the question I thought of Microsoft Translator and live captioning in PowerPoint. 

The live captioning function in PowerPoint lets you choose the language in which you want your subtitles to appear. The great thing about it is that you can have your subtitles appear in a language other than the one in which you are speaking. For example, you can speak in English and have your subtitles appear in Spanish. Watch this video for a demonstration of how it works. 

Microsoft Translator is another option for translating presentations in realtime. You can use it with or without PowerPoint. Watch this video for my brief demonstration of Microsoft Translator.

Creating and Conducting Polls in Google Slides and PowerPoint

Poll Everywhere is a polling tool that I've used off and on throughout the past decade. It's a great tool for gathering questions from an audience, polling an audience, and seeing word clouds of sentiment from an audience. People can respond to your poll questions from their laptops, tablets, and phones. 

You can use Poll Everywhere as a stand-alone tool or you can integrate it into Google Slides. When you use it in Google Slides you can seamlessly transition from your regular presentation into a polling slide. In the following video I demonstrate how to use Poll Everywhere in Google Slides. 

Poll Everywhere also offers a free PowerPoint add-in that you can use to create and conduct polls directly in your presentation. You can create polls that are multiple choice and open response. Results of the poll can be displayed in a variety of formats. Students can respond to your polls from their computers of phones anonymously or as logged-in users. 

In the following video I demonstrate how to create and conduct a poll in PowerPoint. The video also shows you how students respond to a poll created using the Poll Everywhere PowerPoint add-in. The features shown in the video work with both free and paid Poll Everywhere accounts. 

How to Add Background Music to PowerPoint Presentations

Last week a reader emailed me to ask for help adding background music to a PowerPoint presentation. He mentioned that he was using the web browser-based version of PowerPoint and was having trouble getting audio to play in the background throughout the presentation. Fortunately, there was a fairly easy fix that I was able to share with him. As is the case with many questions like that one, the best way to explain it was to show it with a short screencast video. 

In this short video I demonstrate how to add background music to your PowerPoint presentations and play it on a continuous loop. In the video I also mention a great place to find free music to use in your presentations. 

Applications for Education

Adding background music on a continuous loop can be a good way to enhance a little introductory presentation for the start of a class meeting. I'd put together a few slides that have things like the day's agenda and a "do now" activity for students then play it for students as they come into class.

How to Use PowerPoint Cameo

Cameo is a relatively new feature in PowerPoint that lets you insert your live camera feed into any and all of the slides in your presentations. Cameo is a different feature from the video insertion option and the presentation recording options that you may have previously used in PowerPoint. Cameo displays your live camera feed so that your face (or other objects in your camera) appears on your slides throughout your presentation. 

As you can see by watching my short video that is embedded below, PowerPoint Cameo lets you position your camera feed anywhere you like on your slides. You can even reposition the feed from slide to slide. And as you'll also see in the video below, Cameo has some neat editing tools that you can use to change the way that your camera feed appears to your audience. 

Watch my short video to learn how to use PowerPoint Cameo. 

Applications for Education
PowerPoint Cameo provides a great way to make sure that your students can see you throughout a presentation that you are giving virtually in Teams, Zoom, or even in Google Meet.

How to Add a Timer to Your PowerPoint Slides

One of the all-time most popular videos on my YouTube channel was about how to add a countdown timer to your PowerPoint slides. Unfortunately, the method used in that video no longer works. I was contacted earlier this week by someone who wanted to know if I could suggest another way to add a timer to her PowerPoint slides. I made this new video to answer that question. 

In the new video that is embedded below I demonstrate how to add the Breaktime timer to your PowerPoint slides. 

For those who are not PowerPoint users or those would simply prefer to have a countdown timer option that is not tied to PowerPoint, here are four other timer tools that I recommend.

How to Record a Video Lesson in PowerPoint

A few years ago I published a video about how to create a video by using the recording tool built into PowerPoint. Since then Microsoft has added more features to the recording tools in PowerPoint. So last week I recorded a new tutorial on how to record a video lesson in PowerPoint. 

In this short video I demonstrate how to record yourself talking while drawing on your PowerPoint slides. The best feature of the recording tool is the teleprompter mode that allows you to see your speaker notes displayed above your slides while recording. The final video doesn't display the speaker notes so your viewers won't even know that you were reading your notes. 

Watch my new video to learn how to record a video lesson in the desktop (Windows) version of PowerPoint. 

Applications for Education
If you have been teaching for a while, you probably have some slideshows that you've made and really like. With the built-in recorder you can quickly turn those slideshows into short video lessons.

If you like the idea of turning your PowerPoint slides into videos, but you don't want to appear on camera then you might be interested in trying Narakeet which turns your PowerPoint slides into narrated videos for you.

Three Ideas for Telling Stories With Pictures

This is an excerpt from this week's Practical Ed Tech Tip of the Week newsletter. This week, subscribers to the newsletter received a PDF that outlined ten ideas and tools for telling stories with pictures. 

Create Picture Books
WriteReader is a good tool for elementary school students to use to create image-based stories. WriteReader has two distinguishing features that I always point out to new users. First, it provides space for teachers to give feedback to students directly under every word that they write. Second, WriteReader has a huge library of images, including some from popular programs like Sesame Street, that can be used for writing prompts. WriteReader does have a Google Classroom integration that makes it easy to get your students started creating picture-based stories. Watch this video to learn how to use WriteReader.



Create Talking Pictures
ChatterPix Kids is one of my favorite digital storytelling apps for elementary school students to use. The free app is available in an iPad form and in an Android form. To use the app students simply open it on their iPads or Android devices and then take a picture. Once they've taken a picture students draw a mouth on their pictures. With the mouth in place students then record themselves talking for up to thirty seconds. The recording is then added to the picture and saved as a video on the students' iPads or Android devices. Tutorials on how to use both versions of the app can be seen here.



Picture Yourself in Front of Any Landmark
There are many free tools for removing the background from any image that you own. Use these tools to quickly remove the background from an image of yourself. Once the background is removed you can take the image of yourself and layer it over a new background image. Canva has this as a built-in feature as does PowerPoint. The process in Canva is outlined in this video. The process of using PowerPoint to remove and replace image backgrounds is outlined in this video.

Quick and Easy Ways to Remove Image Backgrounds

Removing the background from an image is a good way to protect your privacy and that of people who might unintentionally be in the background of your pictures. Remove image backgrounds is also a good way to get a stand-alone image of yourself to then place in front of a different background. For example, I could take a picture of myself at my local ski mountain then replace the background so that I look like I'm climbing Mount Everest. 

In the following video I provide demonstrations of four quick and easy ways to remove the background from your images. One way to use this with students is to have them place themselves in front of landmarks of the world then write about their virtual visit to those landmarks.

In the video above I demonstrated how to remove image backgrounds with the following free tools:

• PowerPoint
• Remove.bg
• Adobe Creative Cloud Express
• Canva

A New PowerPoint Recording Option

For a couple of years now I've been using and recommending Canva's presentation recording tool because it has a built-in teleprompter. That feature lets you record your video while viewing your speaker notes, but the speaker notes don't appear in the final recording. The latest version of PowerPoint now includes that same capability. 

Mike Tholfsen recently published this new video in which he demonstrates how to use the updated built-in recording tool in PowerPoint. In the video you'll see him demonstrate how to use the teleprompter mode when recording a video in PowerPoint. In the video he also demonstrates how to blur backgrounds when recording. Finally, make sure you watch to the end of the video to learn how to export the video and how to make quick edits to your recording. 

The new features that Mike demonstrated in the video are currently available to Office 365 Insiders. If you're not an Insider, you'll have to join me in waiting for these features to appear in PowerPoint. In the meantime, you can use the current version of PowerPoint's recording tool as well as a handful of other helpful but often overlooked PowerPoint features.

Four Convenient Classroom Timers

I've always taught in schools that use a block schedule. The shortest blocks being 80 minutes and the longest ones being 240 minutes! Therefore, I've always used some type of timer to keep track of how long students were working on an activity and to keep track of break times between activities. When I first started teaching I did that with an actual egg timer like this one. Later I started using online countdown timer tools. The first one being Online-Stopwatch.com. That's one of the four convenient classroom timers that I featured in this short video. 

In the video above I featured the following four online timer tools:

• "Set Timer" in Google.
• Online-Stopwatch.com
• Classtools.net's Countdown Timer
• Classroomscreen.com

The one that I use the most is the "set timer" option in Google. 

If you use a lot of slides in your classroom, you might want to include a countdown timer in those slides. In this video I demonstrate how to add a countdown timer to PowerPoint. In this video I show how you can add a countdown timer to Google Slides. 

Use Canva's Design and Recording Tools With Your PowerPoint and Google Slides

The other day a reader sent me an interesting question that I hadn't thought about before. That was whether or not you can use Canva's recording studio with Google Slides. At first I thought to myself, "why not just make a screen recording of the slides with something like Screencastify?" Then I thought about it some more and realized that the reason for the question was that Canva's recording studio makes it easy to see your speaker notes while recording, but it doesn't show the speaker notes in the final version of the recording. 

It is possible to use your Google Slides, PowerPoint slides, and Keynote slides in Canva to use Canva's recording and design tools with those slides. The trick is to first make sure that your slides are in PowerPoint format. To do that download your Google Slides or Keynote slides as a PPTX file. Then you can upload that file to your Canva account where you can then use all of Canva's editing, design, and recording tools. Watch this video to see how that whole process works. 

Applications for Education

Canva is one of my favorite tools for creating short video lessons with your existing slides. The process is less clunky than using a screen recording tool to capture your slides as you explain the key points on them. If you're a Google Slides, PowerPoint, or Keynote user who has ignored Canva's recording tool because you didn't want to have to recreate your slides, the method that I demonstrated in the video above is for you. 

PowerPoint Cameo Looks Cool and Could be Useful

On the heels of yesterday's post about making better Zoom presentations here's another post about a tool that could improve your online presentations. Microsoft recently added a new feature to PowerPoint. That feature is called Cameo. 

Cameo is a PowerPoint feature that lets you import a live stream of your webcam into your slides. In other words as your slides are presented your webcam feed appears in the slides. You can position the feed to appear anywhere on your slides. You can even put the feed inside a little frame or outline in your slides. 

Cameo is a feature that is currently only available to those who are Microsoft Office Insiders. I am not one so I've only seen the feature demonstrated by Mike Tholfsen who explains it more in this short video. 

Applications for Education
I can see this feature being a nice alternative to having your webcam feed displayed next to your slides. It makes for more streamlined look and puts more focus on the slides and a bit less on the speaker.

Three Ways to Create Video Lessons With Your Existing Slides

Last week I hosted a webinar about creating videos for asynchronous instruction. One of the points that I made in the webinar was that you don't need to start from scratch every time you want to record a new lesson. In fact, one of the easiest ways to get started is to record over a few of your existing slides. In this new video I demonstrate three methods for doing that. 

In the following video you'll learn how to quickly create video lessons with Canva slides, Google Slides, and PowerPoint slides. 

It's important to remember that you're better off creating a few short videos than one long video. That's why I recommend starting with just a few slides. 

Webinars for Your School or Organization

If you're interested in having me host a webinar for your school or organization, send me an email at richard (at) byrne.media

Some of the topics I can cover in a webinar for you include:

• Making and teaching with video.
• Fun with formative assessment.
• Google Earth & Maps for social studies and more.
• Developing digital portfolios.
• Copyright for the classroom (United States-based).

Best of 2021 - Five Helpful PowerPoint Features You Might Be Overlooking

As I do every year, I'm taking this week as a break from publishing new blog posts and will be republishing some of the most popular posts of the year. Here's one from November. 

PowerPoint isn't the flashiest ed tech tool on the block and it certainly isn't the newest. In fact, you might have read "PowerPoint" and thought "old." But as old as it is (34 years) there are new things added to it and hidden gems within it that keep it going strong. If it has been a while since you looked at PowerPoint, here are some features you might not be aware of that can be helpful to you and your students. 

Record a Video in PowerPoint
The Windows 10 desktop version of PowerPoint has some neat features including the option to record a video and instantly insert it into your presentation. Watch this tutorial to learn how that's done.



Remove Image Backgrounds
PowerPoint has a handy built-in tool for removing the background from your images. Here's a demonstration of how to use that feature.



Get Instant Feedback on Your Presentation
Presenter Coach is a great tool for getting instant feedback on your presentation pacing and more. It's available in the online version of PowerPoint. This tutorial shows you how it works.



Automatic Captioning of Your Presentation
PowerPoint includes features for automatic captioning of your presentations. Captions appear while you speak. The captioning tool will also translate your presentation while you speak. Watch this video to see how it works.



Accessibility Checker
If you're not sure whether or not your slides will be accessible to all students, you can run an accessibility check on your PowerPoint slides. This video shows you how to run an accessibility check on your PowerPoint presentation and how to add alt text to pictures and videos in your PowerPoint presentation.



Add more features...
Through the use of PowerPoint add-ins you can add even more functionality to your PowerPoint slides. For example, you can quickly add a countdown timer to your slides. Here's a demo of how to add a countdown timer to your slides. This video shows you how to find and install add-ins.

Five Helpful PowerPoint Features You Might Be Overlooking

PowerPoint isn't the flashiest ed tech tool on the block and it certainly isn't the newest. In fact, you might have read "PowerPoint" and thought "old." But as old as it is (34 years) there are new things added to it and hidden gems within it that keep it going strong. If it has been a while since you looked at PowerPoint, here are some features you might not be aware of that can be helpful to you and your students. 

Record a Video in PowerPoint
The Windows 10 desktop version of PowerPoint has some neat features including the option to record a video and instantly insert it into your presentation. Watch this tutorial to learn how that's done.



Remove Image Backgrounds
PowerPoint has a handy built-in tool for removing the background from your images. Here's a demonstration of how to use that feature.



Get Instant Feedback on Your Presentation
Presenter Coach is a great tool for getting instant feedback on your presentation pacing and more. It's available in the online version of PowerPoint. This tutorial shows you how it works.



Automatic Captioning of Your Presentation
PowerPoint includes features for automatic captioning of your presentations. Captions appear while you speak. The captioning tool will also translate your presentation while you speak. Watch this video to see how it works.



Accessibility Checker
If you're not sure whether or not your slides will be accessible to all students, you can run an accessibility check on your PowerPoint slides. This video shows you how to run an accessibility check on your PowerPoint presentation and how to add alt text to pictures and videos in your PowerPoint presentation.



Add more features...
Through the use of PowerPoint add-ins you can add even more functionality to your PowerPoint slides. For example, you can quickly add a countdown timer to your slides. Here's a demo of how to add a countdown timer to your slides. This video shows you how to find and install add-ins.