5130: Instructional Message Ideation

I have started working on the final culminating project for IT-5130 and have some ideas for the content going, but now I need to focus on how to best present them. I've checked out a few tools that I could use, but feel a little bit lost just yet. Do I use Flash, Keynote, Windows Movie Maker, PowerPoint, etc? I figured out that even though many people in the class love Keynote, it appears to be for Mac users only. Just a side note, I love my PC. So that one is out. I looked into VoiceThread, but I don't think the extra features, like being able to comment during the presentation, would be necessary. They might be more distracting than anything, and I plan on showing the message in my classroom rather than only on the web (although it will be available to students for reference online afterwards).

Basically there are 3 tools that I am really focusing on. One is Flash because I enjoy the variety of things it can do, like tweens and giving fonts different gradient fills and being able to see a timeline of the sound and screen so I can match them up. I do worry though that because it is going to be a longer presentation than I have made on Flash, I would end up with one huge timeline. I think a solution to this would be to create multiple scenes, but then do I break up the narration or do I record it in segments. Recording multiple segments might make the presentation sound choppy. I will have to look into this issue.

The 2nd tool would be Windows Movie Maker. I have seen some great presentations in our class this semester that were made with the tool, and I have used it before to make a picture video of a trip to Ecuador. It was easy to line up the images with the audio, and I like the various transitions. I am wondering if there is a way to make slides similar to what I have done on PowerPoint and insert them in the Movie Maker so I can still be able to match up visual and audio. If I cannot insert the slides themselves, is there a way I can make a slide and save it as a picture or edit in Fireworks and insert? I wonder if this would be creating a ton of extra work.

The other tool I am seriously considering is PowerPoint. I want to use the best tool for the presentation, but I have also been excited about how much I have learned about PowerPoint this semester and finding ways to use it effectively. At the beginning of the semester I was so depressed by what Tufte had to say about the tool, but as we have gone through various readings and projects, I feel like I have been able to make big steps in creating more powerful presentations with this tool. Also, it is something that is readily available on my computer at school and at home, so I can work on this and future projects at both places (during my off hours of course!) and really try to make bigger improvements. Ultimately I want to make sure my students are gaining the most they can from my presentations, and I feel like I can develop my PowerPoint skills to achieve this. It may be a challenge, but I feel like it is possible. The other benefit of using this tool is that I have used it so much before that I am familiar with how to do various things with it and would not need to spend a lot of time learning the tool while trying to make a big project - I could save learning tools for smaller projects, test them out, and then see if I want to keep going with it.

So that's where I am today. I hope to get some good work on the project this week. I will see how that goes as I plan to spend a lot of time getting pictures taken for the presentation - I want to use a lot of my own images, especially of the school and various staff members, so I need to get started on that in case some need to be re-taken or re-worked.