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Recently we looked at some of the helpful options for starting a new PowerPoint, like templates.  Today we will zoom in for a closer look at how one of those templates, Trading Cards, works.  This will be a really short post today, because it is so easy to do, so there aren’t many directions! Why would you have your students make trading cards?  No matter what you teach, there is a use for trading cards. English Language Arts Trading Card Ideas There are some obvious use cases in English/Language Arts and Social Studies.  Students can create cards for characters in stories and novels, and evenRead More →

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This one sounds boring, but give it a shot. There’s more to it than meets the eye.  Today, Day 31 of 365 Ideas for Office 365, we return to #OnlyinPowerPoint.  That’s because of what you can do with the icons in Microsoft Office. Let’s open a blank PowerPoint.  Click on Insert in the Ribbon, and click on “Icons”.  A window opens with a huge library of “Icons”, helpfully divided into categories.  Typically you would be looking for an icon for a specific purpose, not to just throw on a blank slide, but for now we’re just exploring what we can do with icons.  You mayRead More →

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Today  365 Ideas for Office 365 is continuing in PowerPoint, but definitely breaking from the #OnlyinPowerPoint segment, because I totally first saw this in Google Slides.  In fact Tony Vincent deserves 100% of the credit, as far as I know.  But Tony’s a great example of how, if you are an educational blogger, and you are doing creative, cool new things, most likely you are writing about how to do things with Google, not Microsoft.  And every once in a while (especially in Sheets), you have to be in Google, because the Microsoft version doesn’t do that.  But the vast majority of the time, youRead More →

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Since PowerPoint can be used for so many things besides actually projecting a slideshow, there are many times that it is useful to change either the size of a slide, format the background, or both.  Like yesterday’s Smart Art, these are changes that you can make in both the desktop and the online versions of PowerPoint.  Welcome to day 29 of 365 Ideas for Office 365.  Disclosure:  This does not come under the heading of #OnlyinPowerPoint, because unlike most of the things we’ve looked at over the last week, you can also do some of this in Google Slides, although not with nearly the depthRead More →

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Welcome to Day 28 of 365 Ideas for Office 365, where we are currently focusing on features that are #onlyinPowerPoint.  That’s not to say they aren’t in other Microsoft products like Word, just that they’re only in Microsoft products.  This includes Morph, Designer, and QuickStarter, and today’s topic, SmartArt.  To find Smart Art, either in PowerPoint desktop or PowerPoint online, click on Insert on the ribbon, then the dropdown for SmartArt (online) or just click on SmartArt (desktop). SmartArt in PowerPoint Online SmartArt in PowerPoint on the desktop As you can see, there are many more options in the desktop version. PowerPoint desktop has soRead More →

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AI is popping up throughout Microsoft Office and Office 365.  Today in 365 Ideas for Office 365 we will be looking at Designer, one of the ways PowerPoint harnesses AI to benefit teachers and students in creating presentations by doing the design heavy-lifting and letting us focus on the content.  Even before I enter any content, I can use the Design tool to get started.  By clicking on the Design tab and then Design Ideas you can choose from some suggested themes.  But that’s not so different from just choosing a theme when you create a new presentation, like we covered here last week. DesignRead More →

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Last time we looked at how your students can create an AI-created outline and starter slides when creating a new PowerPoint presentation.  That is specifically for creating a presentation based on a topic.  PowerPoint also has a large library of presentation templates available based on the type of content you want to present.  Those themes and templates are what we will look at today in 365 Ideas for Office 365. When you first choose to create a new PowerPoint, you are confronted with a great many choices (Including the Quick Starter), but these are simply visual themes- packages of background images and color-schemes. Theme suggestionsRead More →

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Show your students the kick-starter already built into PowerPoint to help them get productive faster in their assignments and projects. Day 25 of 365 Ideas for Office 365 is PowerPoint‘s Quick Starter feature. How many of your students have trouble getting started?  For me, it’s decision-making.  My wife and I agree that it’s fair that if one of us decides what to have fr dinner, and the other one makes it, that’s a fair division of labor, because it’s so hard for either of us to make a decision.  For a lot of students, they can pick a topic, but don’t know how to getRead More →

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Adaptive Lines Move with your Shapes Today in 365 Ideas for Office 365 we are looking at what I call adaptive lines- the ability to attach lines to shapes in PowerPoint that move with those shapes.  When making Thinking Maps* by hand, and trying to do it “the proper way”, we don’t draw 9 circles for our double-bubble map and then fill in the bubbles.  *Thinking Maps are a set of 8 specific graphic organizers that each depict a certain way of thinking or organizing content.  The double-bubble map is for compare/contrast. Graphic Organizers The first example is used like a traditional graphic organizer, preset,Read More →

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Welcome to Day 23 of 365 Ideas for Office 365.  We temporarily moved on from OneNote and Immersive Reader into exploring the depth and richness of PowerPoint.  Yesterday we looked at aligning and distributing items visually on a slide.  Today we’re looking at Morph, a really cool transition that makes uses AI (Artificial Intelligence) to make items change size and position as you advance form one slide to another. Here’s the first one I ever did, which I call my Gatsby Morph. Gatsby Morph (sample) Starting from scratch The next few clips show me adding 6 trucks to a slide to make a parade, shrinkRead More →