[IAEP] View Slides an alternative to PowerPoint?

[Jim Simmons]

David,

I just checked out Google Docs for the first time and I'm impressed.
It looks and feels very much like PowerPoint, and you can even
download your finished presentation in PDF format for the Read
activity.  I think for teachers that depend on PowerPoint it's a
reasonable answer.

I haven't tried turtle art yet, but I like the idea of kids using it
to create presentations.  One of the useful ideas we get from Unix is
having a lot of little tools that do just one thing that you can plug
together with scripts to make something.  I get the impression that
turtle art is a bit like that.  Or even my suggestion of using one of
the paint Activities to make slides then combining them with View
Slides might work.  The thing is, PowerPoint is a terrible thing to
give a kid.  It gives him clip art that looks better than anything he
could draw himself, fonts that look better than any text he could
write, transitions that are fancier  than anything he could program,
and spell checking that corrects mistakes before he's even finished
making them.  It might make a teacher's life easier (and I'm not
against that) but it would kill a kid's creative impulses.

I have thought about adding more PowerPoint-like features to View
Slides and may still do it, but I would stop well before creating the
thing itself.

James Simmons


David Van Assche wrote:
> A real simple alternative to powerpoint/impress that looks and smells
> like it, but with maybe really limited functionality would be loved by
> teachers everywhere, At least, all the teachers I have met rely very
> heavily on powerpoint in one form or another, be it integrated into
> other software like moodle or an LMS, or used with an interactive
> whiteboard/touchpad soft, or just used by itself. But normally it is
> used in a very limited fashion, and without much of the fancy
> transitions/coloring/themeing/graphing and all that stuff... IF they
> want something like that, it would make sense to steer them to
> turtleart... but there needs to be something much much simpler...
>
> David
>