Presentation Software
• Mimio Studio •
Mimio Studio is a software application for real-time capturing of input from an interactive white-board system (e.g. a SMARTBoard) via touch sensors. The suite features many exclusive functions such as a built-in “marker” program similar to the SMARTBoard’s and a feature that hides parts of pages in a presentation to which the presenter has not yet advanced.
Grouped with a graphics tablet, Mimio Studio turns your basic computer and projector into an interactive white-board (almost).
Mimio offers a free download of Mimio Studio. Click HERE for the free download.
Mimio also offers a Community for Educators, called MimioConnect. Here, educators can collaborate and share lesson plans and activities.
Recording the screen with Mimio Studio is very simple, and creates great educational videos; especially for those teachers that don’t use PowerPoint.
• OpenOffice.org •
OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. OpenOffice has been downloaded more than 100,000,000 times. There are 2 benefits of being open source: 1) the software is free, and 2) there is a network of people always working to make it better.
OpenOffice.org aims to compete with Microsoft Office and to emulate its look and feel where suitable. It can read and write most of the file formats found in Microsoft Office, and many other applications.
OpenOffice can be downloaded HERE.
You can learn more about OpenOffice.org at the OpenOffice.org – Wikipedia.
OpenOffice Impress is the presentation program similar to Microsoft PowerPoint and Apple Keynote. Impress can export presentations to Adobe Flash (SWF) files, allowing them to be played on any computer with a Flash player installed. It also includes the ability to create PDF files, and the ability to read Microsoft PowerPoint’s .ppt format. Impress lacks ready-made presentation designs. However, templates are readily available on the Internet.
Presenter Screen is a feature currently under development which will allow annotations during a presentation. This extension has several other great features, but it is still in Beta testing. It can be downloaded HERE, but they are still working out the bugs.
• Microsoft PowerPoint •
Microsoft PowerPoint, part of Microsoft Office, is the most common presentation software on the market. Most screen recording applications work very well with PowerPoint. Camtasia Studio has a plugin that integrates to two together, making recording a PowerPoint presentation as simple as clicking one button. The other screen recording applications work very well with PowerPoint as well.
The must used feature in PowerPoint when vodcasting is the annotation feature during the presentation. This allows you to actually write on the slides during the presentation. This is why it is important to have a digital writing tool (graphics tablet).
Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007 can be purchased with an educator discount for $90, making it an affordable resource.