Thursday, 8 May 2014

May 9, 2014 - Haiku Deck and a Freebie for our Fabulous Teachers

Happy Friday everyone!!

I am sure that everyone has become tired of the tried and true power point presentations and has experienced the prospective motion sickness when the ‘Prezi’ frames move about too quickly on the screen.   This week I would like to introduce you to a new option which you (and your students) can use to create and edit presentations online and on the web – Haiku Deck.

Haiku Deck is a free iPad/iPhone app (Haiku Deck) and online web tool (haikudeck.com) that lets you create presentations with over 35 million fantastic images and 6 presentation themes.  By creating an account and clicking on ‘New Deck’ you can begin creating your unique and colourful presentation.  The unique feature that Haiku Deck offers is that you can save your presentation on one web tool (i.e. iPad) and retrieve it from your home computer and vice versa.  Additionally, when you are creating your slides, simply type in a key word (i.e. anxiety, books, biology) and Haiku Deck searches the web and locates Creative Commons licensed images for you to use.   If you would rather, you can add your own images or screen shots to the deck from your photo stream, Instagram, Facebook page, Flickr, Picasa or Google Drive, then share your finished presentations on a variety of social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and Slideshare.  You can even hook your phone or iPad up to a projector and present directly from it, embed the deck in a blog or website, or download a PDF version to use for a handout.  The iPad app version of Haiku Deck allows you to include private notes to guide your presentation or public notes for everyone to view as they follow along.  Decks can be published with three different privacy settings – private to be viewed only by you, restricted to be viewed only by those you grant permission to and public which is available for anyone to view and search out on Google.



One favourite feature of Haiku Deck is the user friendly format.  When you are not sure how to begin or where to go next, simply click on the question mark in the upper right hand corner and you will immediately view an overlay which describes the possible actions available to you.   Once you decide what you would like to do next, simply click on the screen and the overlay disappears to allow you to continue creating.



Finally, in honour of teacher’s appreciation week, Haiku Deck has offered to give teachers ANY OF THEIR PREMIUM THEMES FOR FREEJust open up the iPad app tap on Themes, and select any locked theme showing a green $ in the corner, and it’s your for free – but only until May 10th!!

I hope that you find Haiku deck to be a useful and productive tool for yourself and your students.

Cheers,
Stace

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