Introducing PowerPoint to the children

Our aim was to produce a Power Point presentation using the Science Year 5 topic of plants. This could later be used as a reference source for other pupils. The task was to be completed by 12 Year 6 pupils in an IT Club, which was to take place after school.

The pupils had already some knowledge of the subject in Year 5 and this enabled us to move on at a quicker pace. We introduced the Power Point software by showing the pupils a very basic presentation. The slides incorporated the main points of the project and showed the pupils some ideas on animation, sound, graphics (using a scanner, digital camera) and how a sequence of slides could be linked together.

Slides are easy to create using the Insert, New Slide ... option. They will be displayed in the order they are created, but this can be easily changed by dragging the slides in the Slide Sorter view

We also discussed recording their own sounds, as this was now possible with a bigger hard drive on our networked suite.

This presentation led to a great deal of discussion amongst the group and ideas were forthcoming. The children decided that an electronic reference book would be of more value than a large presentation. We looked into this idea and discovered that with the use of Action Buttons the pages could be hyper-linked, enabling us to move backwards and forwards without having to run the slides in numerical sequence.