4 articles Tag design

Teaching Design Through Presentations

by on February 17, 2012, 0 comments

As an ICT teacher, I feel I am responsible for teaching the middle school students a lot of what they need to know about presentations. When it comes to presentations, I find that their technology skills are fine and they are easily able to use Powerpoint or Keynote to make a presentation. The problem I see with their slideshows is that they have a lot to learn design wise. With effective design comes effective communication.

To help my students develop effective presentations, I like to educate my students on some simple principals of good design. I use a range of resources for this, but the one I like most is Jesse Desjardins’s (the Social Media Manager for Tourism Australia) presentations on Slideshare that outlines the bad elements of design and gives great tips on how to improve it. The following slideshow is my favourite as it not only tells us what not to do and how to improve design, but it also sets a great example in itself.

 

STEAL THIS PRESENTATION!
View more presentations from @JESSEDEE


Another issue I see arising is that students regularly complain that their content lets them down and that it’s hard to make a boring topic interesting. To that argument, I like to turn to The Oatmeal, who is known for making some very funny comics on the internet. He is most passionate about punctuation and has made a range of comics on how to use specific punctuation conventions in a fun and engaging way. My favourite is the semicolon tutorial which he developed. This would be perfect for a middle school English class. To view the comic click the image below.

I also try to use good elements of design in all of my presentations. It takes a long time, but I think it’s important to show the students good examples. You can see my examples on my Slideshare page. The slideshow I am most proud of is my passwords lesson, I think it’s visually engaging and incorporates a lot of good elements of design. Plus now I’ve spent the time to make a great presentation, I can use it over and over again each year.

How do you teach good design in your classes? Do you always set a good example? Do you give the students any specific, real world examples? Leave a comment below and let me know.

Mac OSX Keyboard Shortcuts Poster

by on February 3, 2012, 0 comments

My students have transitioned from using a desktop PC to using Mac laptops so I thought I would make them a poster displaying most of the common keyboard shortcuts. Hopefully this is going to save them some time and make them more efficient when using computer. Feel free to use it in your classroom, office, staffroom, etc. Images of the poster can be found here on Flickr.

 

 
I designed the poster with simplicity in mind. I wanted it to be aesthetically pleasing but easy to read from a long distance as not all computers could be proximal to the posters. I figured that the font size was the smallest I could use to meet the intended purpose of the posters. This also meant that I had to withhold some shortcuts as all of the shortcuts I wanted to add would not fit.

How To Save Transparent Text In Photoshop

by on September 9, 2011, 0 comments

When working on our schools year, I work with Jostens Yearbook Avenue and my students like to find their own fonts and use them on the pages.

The best place I have seen to find custom fonts is dafont.com and once they are installed on your computer you can then select them in Photoshop to use.

Once you create a heading with your new font, you must then save the image as a transparency. We always forget how to make the image transparent so we can set it over other images and backgrounds so I decided to make a video to explain it.

P.S. One guess what font I am using?

Family Festival Poster 2010

by on October 17, 2010, 0 comments

On Friday night, a group of mothers from the Family Festival committee begged me to help them make a Japanese poster for Family Festival. They stuck around and helped with the Japanese and this is what I came up with. I hope you can all make it down for my favourite day on the school calendar!