[IAEP] View Slides an alternative to PowerPoint?

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 02.07.2009, at 17:41, Jim Simmons wrote:

> 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.


Fully agreed, so what's wrong with giving Etoys a try?

- Bert -