Ace your Presentations with Speaker Coach

​​I am doing a presentation at a conference on Friday and like my normal self, I am totally nervous and want to do well.  To practice the presentation, I tried out Microsoft’s Speaker Coach in PowerPoint and now I want to share how awesome it is with all of you! I was able to figure out how long my presentation was (too long), how many times I said umm (lots), if my pace sped up and slowed down (yep) and a whole bunch more information about how I present!  This is a valuable tool for me, for teachers and for all our students who use PowerPoint.  This reminds me, I can also turn on Closed Captioning in PowerPoint when I present and we missed a link in our Tech Tip last week: Captions and Soundfield in the Classroom – Learn71​

How to use Speaker Coach:

1.  Open your PowerPoint presentation online (it must be the online version)

2.  Click on the arrow beside Present at the top right and then click on Rehearse with Coach

3. When you are ready to start, click on Start Rehearsing.

If you leave Show Real-time feedback checked, as you are speaking it encourages you and lets you know what you make mistakes (like saying umm​ over and over).

4.  When you finish presenting, press end or escape to get out of presenter view and you will see your results.  Make sure you scroll down to see them all! There are a whole bunch of new areas of data you can see like if words were repeated, pronounced correctly and if your language was inclusive.

To learn more about Speaker Coach, click here.

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Earth Day Ideas and Closed Captions for PowerPoint

​I keep getting all these great Earth Day ideas sent to me and instead of letting them live in my email collection, I would like to share them with you!  Common Sense​ Education has collected some great sites with videos and activities and of course, I can’t help but share the awesome Minecraft worlds that are designed to help students visualize problems our Earth is facing and to design solutions.  Hopefully, some of these ideas will inspire you for Earth Day on the 22nd.  

Jane Rondow and Shannon Hagen have also added a great page of instructions for using PowerPoint in your classroom with Closed Captions to help students catch all your important words. ​​

Earth Day Ideas:

  • From Common Sense:
  • Make an impact this Earth Day with Minecraft Education
    It’s almost Earth Day! Show your students they have the power to change the world with Minecraft lesson collections focused on creating a more sustainable planet:
    Graphic image of animals standing in an elevated area with mountains on the background with light and dark blue frames around it
    (NEW) Planet Earth III: Explore the way animals’ lives are intertwined by playing as predator and prey, parent and offspring, friend and ally. (Also check out Planet Earth I and II-they are beautiful!
    Sustainability City: Investigate real-life sustainable processes—sustainable home components, managing waste, generating electricity, responsible forestry, and more.
    Climate Futures: Aligned to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, this lesson educates youth about climate change and how they can have a positive impact.
    Explore resources >

PowerPoint Captioning

PowerPoint has built-in tools to increase the accessibility of presentations using their built-in captioning and translation functions, which can easily be set as default functions.
The Caption function allows you to have captions in one language. Presenting live will enable participants to choose the language of captions.​​
Follow the steps below to enable captioning for your next presentation:
1.  Click on the “Slide Show” tab in the PowerPoint ribbon.
2.  Check the box “Always Use Subtitles”.  This is found in the “Captions & Subtitles” section.
3.  Choose the language both for what is spoken AND what is displayed.  ***It is English by default.
4.  Determine where you’d like the captions to be displayed.
Note: If you are choosing “Overlaid,” be sure the background of your slides offers enough colour contrast to the color of the captions.

You can use the “More Settings” link to format captions even further (font colour, font type, background transparency, etc.)…
 
***NOTE:  The “Present Live” option can be used if you would like to have the captions translated into different languages for the audience.

Click on the link below to learn more about Closed Captioning, Presenting “Live” and how to best deliver instructional resources to our hard of hearing students.​​
 

​Captioning and Soundfields in the Classroom

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Creating a QR Code in the Web Address Bar (Edge)

Happy Tuesday! This week’s Tech Tip, by Shannon Hagen, zooms in on the power of QR codes—those square-shaped barcodes that you can quickly scan with your phone or iPad to get to a website or open digital content.  As this year’s Code Quest Arcade gets closer, we are asking anyone who would like to have their class share their coding projects to please take a moment to open this link (Arcade Presenter Form) and fill out a quick form by May 3rd. It’s just to help us know how many computers we need for the event.

QR codes are being used more and more as people figure out how to use them effectively.  They allow users to quickly access information from a web browser just by scanning the QR code with a mobile device.  In the past, we would have to use a separate app or program to create these codes.  Now however, it is built right into the Edge browser.​​  

(It can be done in Chrome but with a couple of extra steps)

Follow the directions below to do this:

1.  Open the Edge browser.  The icon looks like this:

2. Type in the website address you would like to create a QR code from in the address bar.  Press Enter to go to the site.  (You won’t see the QR code icon yet).

3.  Click on the address bar right next to the website address.  You now see a few icons being displayed on the far right.  

4.  Click on the QR code icon (see image above).  This will open up another window which will allow you to Copy or Download the QR code.

5.  The user just has to open the camera app on the mobile device and frame the QR code in the yellow brackets displayed on the screen.  The link will be displayed at the bottom of the screen.  Tap on this to open the website.

Use the directions listed below for creating Shareable Links from QR codes.

👆Creating Sharable Links from QR Codes ​

​

For Google Chrome:

Open the Chrome Browser.  Enter in website address.  Press Enter to go to site.

Click on “…” (ellipses) on the far right of the address bar at the top.  Select “Save and share” -> “Create QR code.”

Clicking on it will open another window to “Copy or Download”.

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