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This is fun stuff.

National Geographic has a neat little utility, Wildlife Filmmaker, that lets students create their own wildlife movie using video, sound, and music clips built right into the site. Students can add their own captions and save (though not download) their movie.

No registration is required, no fee, just easy movie editing fun using basically educational content.

It probably best suits primary grades students and some intermediate situations, but the interface is fitting for all ages.

[via Digital Inspiration]

With Google Docs’ presentation tool (docs.google.com) you now have the ability to publish presentation slides online within your webpage. This means that your students could view slide sets without the need to download them and launch them in PowerPoint, a tool which they may or may not have. This could be great for sharing student work, archiving lecture notes, or even publishing daliy announcements.

If you’re not familiar with Google Docs, an online suite of tools similar to Office, check out this quick video from CommonCraft. Basically it’s free, go-anywhere word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations.

In the following embedded presentation, I’ve outlined the steps to uploading existing PowerPoint slides to your site, including examples for SchoolPointe CMS, WebEdit, POW-PAK, and Moodle (sorry, but it doesn’t appear to work with Progress Book at this point). Email readers may need to visit this post online to see the slides.

While these examples discuss how to load your existing files, you can also use Google Docs to build original presentations from scratch.

As programs go, PowerPoint is not terribly difficult to learn. New slide. Insert text. Save. Go. It is routinely used with students as young as the elementary grades and, in some cases, is the hallmark of technology implementation in the school.

When teaching PowerPoint to students, it’s not the program itself that is difficult to communicate, rather it’s the important idea that PowerPoint (as with its non-Microsoft cousins, Apple’s Keynote and OpenOffice’s Impress) is a single tool with the purpose of supporting the communication - presentation - of an idea. The PowerPoint slide deck is not intended to replace the presenter, nor to display every single word the presenter will say. The slides should do no harm - that is, the content of the slides should not take away from the presentation with distracting graphic, backgrounds, sound effects or transitions. Not to say these are all bad additions, but that they must be selected carefully with the audience and the message in mind.

The ability to deliver an effective oral presentation is a part of our state standards. Where an expectation to include presentation support tools exists, oral presentation skills instruction needs to include good use of presentation tools as a part of teaching the topic.

I want to point you toward two recent articles on the topic of slide design. Take a look at these ideas and think about how they can help polish your own presentation skills.

Garr Reynolds at PresentationZen : PowerPoint tips that Are clear and to the point

Stephen M. Kosslyn at Oxford University Press blog: PowerPoint for Martians?