Middle School students are working hard on their Math Wiki. They are using a variety of tools to create tutorials (Garageband, SmartBoard Notebook, PowerPoint, Animoto).

Their latest creation to be embedded into the Wiki were Animoto Music Videos.

They created PowerPoint slides, then exported them as jpg files to be imported into Wiki were Animoto
Students are learning presentation skills and tools as they are designing the slides to create specific tutorials for math definitions and concepts they are learning in class.

“By learning you will teach;by teaching you will understand.”
~ Latin Proverb

To teach is to learn twice.
~Joseph Joubert, Pensées, 1842

Not only are students organizing their own thoughts and teaching each other, but they are also becoming web publishers who are inspiring and teaching math students around the world.

As they were working on the slides, we learned many things about presentation design:

• don’t use too much text on one slide. If you must have more text, duplicate the slide once or twice to be able to give the reader more time.
• use as many relevant visuals as you can.
• use arrows to point to explanations and help the viewer focus in on what you are trying to explain
• make sure you don’t place text/titles too close to the edges of the slides, as they tend to be out of the frame, when Animoto pans across the slide.
• use contrasting colors
• use bigger font sizes
• less on a slide is better

Here are some of their Animoto examples: