How often do you use PowerPoint in your lessons? How do you make presentations useful without information overload… Here follows a brief list of tools that I use regularly to make my messages stick (a little bit longer…).

ZohoShow: create the presentation on-line or upload a PowerPoint file from your local computer. The site gives you a range of tools to make the presentation sleek and professional. A Great tool indeed.

ToonDoo.com: Create graphics and cartoon strips to highlight a key issue or significant point see French Revolution for an example

PicLens plug-in for PowerPoint 2007: This is a real gem and transforms your PowerPoint 2007 slide shows to powerful and animated presentations.

Rich Chart Live: Although this is more complex and a bit technical, you will get used to this tool quickly after a few attempts. I like this flash-generated chart tool as it makes somewhat dull looking statistics look great!

Glogster: Glogster is in many respects a simple ‘poster’ tool, but you can create effective, purposeful displays with students or to use within your own presentations as they can be stored online and include music, videos and hyperlinks. Glogster is ridiculously easy to use and will benefit your presentations well particularly when it comes to emphasizing key issues or give concrete examples of a concept or idea. See what you think.

Embedding an Adobe Flash file in PowerPoint is fairly straight forward. Click the link below to watch a mini movie about how to embed Flash easily.

How to Embed Flash in PowerPoint

It is also worth noting that this guide only works for PowerPoint earlier versions prior to the 2007 release (thanks phtar!).

A very good guide for the 2007 version is available here (scroll past all the various ads and freebie software until you get to the 2007 guide).

Enjoy.