photo - Large Coffee with Four Creams

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I have a love/hate relationship with PowerPoint (PP). I see value in the medium but I struggle to find effective ways to use it. #Oext234 asks Ontario Extenders to consider PresentationZen and to pick one of the 11 recommendations to improve presentations. I am choosing (5) Remove the nonessential and adding photos instead of text. Please understand, this is an exercise for the Daily Extend. I am not suggesting that the new presentation is really much better than the old one but it is a start and this also gives me a change to explore more Creative Commons photos and a new tool.

Sometimes, I have used PP to act as a guide for me; a way of keeping me on track and reminding me of what comes next. I have basically turned them into great big visual presentation cue cards. Whenever I do this, it reminds me of my very first presentation competition in grade school on Carpenter Ants.

I used this approach when preparing to be filmed for an Orientation video based on a transition to college culture workshop that I have done in-class. In this case, the slides were not shown to the participants, they were only for me. Here is a short clip from my practice video where I created a voice over for the slides I had prepared. The final video, edited by St. Clair College’s Audio/Visual department, is at this end of this post.

Using Tall Tweets, I created a 15 second gif of my original slides:

Using Unsplash, I added photos and then removed most of the text:

This is the final video used now at Orientation:

Feature image: Photo by Vlad Tchompalov on Unsplash

Finally, a real opportunity to add more cats to the internet! In the Curator module, the Consider This activity asks me to used different search opportunities to find a picture. I am going to use two methods using four sites.

Method 1: Collections of Free to Use Photos

The first method involves using collections of usable free pictures. Here is what I found using the terms cats and cuddling on Unsplash. Out of 59 pictures I scrolled through to find this one, only 14 had cats and most, only one cat:

Photo by Wayne Low on Unsplash

Using the same terms on Pixabay, I found lots of cats!

Photo by pogo_mm on Pixabay

Finally, on Pexels, I found lots of cat pictures, but not a lot of cuddling. I had to scroll a long time to find one matching what I was looking for but boy, they were beautiful photos!

Photo by Ninz from Pexels

Method 2: Google Search

For the Google search, I will begin by searching for cats and cuddles with advanced setting for free to use or share photos. Rather than just save the image. I prefer to visit the site and check that I am free to use the photo. Google can be wrong. My search took me to a photo on Wikimedia Commons.

By Safina dhiman [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

Finally, for the Google search method, I did an image search on the Featured Image for this blog post which is a photo that I took of two of my cats, Lily and Pooshka.

20180520_102627 — Lily & Pooshka Photo by Irene Stewart

Here to, I changed the usage rights to filter for reuse and found this photo:

Public domain photo from Pixnio

While taking my own pictures is always an option, the photos available under Creative Commons and Public Domain are certainly of a better quality. As I learn more about my options, finding appropriate photos is becoming easier.

Tag: photo

Zen by PowerPoint

The Internet is for Cats