[Year 12 IT Apps] Powerpoint and DRM

[Roland Gesthuizen]

There was life before PowerPoint. Does nybody have a clear acetate roll and
OHP markers within arms reach?  I was never quite a master of cranking,
talking, and entertain whilst fill in the gaps, smudging the colors and
always mixed up my water and solvent based pens. Then I experimented with
some huge ASCII based screen slides on a colour EGA monitor. (Say, how do I
open an obscure Harvard Graphics file from the early 1990's).

I notice your word doc. Now I archive nearly all my work now as PDF, ODT and
ODP documents, these standards should be around for a long time. My
favourite desktop search engines Copernic <http://www.copernic.com> and
Beagle <http://beagle-project.org> do a swell job of indexing these when I
go mining about for data.

There is a cool extension to Firefox called
Aardvark<http://karmatics.com/aardvark/>that can be used to isolate
key parts of web pages, tweaking content to
remove most advertising etc (as a rule, I leave in the author and licence
info). I do this in Firefox then print to an Ubuntu PDF printer. This
cleaned up PDF file is great to either distribute as handouts for my
students or add to a Moodle discussion forum to stimulate some topic
discussion amongst my students. A colleague pointed out that Aardvark also
lets you see the parts that are used to build up some of the more complex
web pages and mash-ups.

Happy Easter term break everybody .. hope you get a visit from ye olde Bilby
:-)

Regards Roland

On 05/04/07, Timmer-Arends <timmer at melbpc.org.au> wrote:
>
> Hello Roland
>
> <snip>PowerPoint Presentations are a disaster - new research shows that
> the
> human brain processes and retains more information if it is digested in
> either its verbal or written form, but not both at the same time.
> http://tinyurl.com/2z4yrx
> </snip>
>
> Interesting to see that research has supported what some people have been
> arguing for a long time now, but then I would also note that the report
> says:
> "It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in
> a
> different form. " - so (as the cliche would have it) PPT is not bad per
> se,
> it's how you use it.
>
> Attached an interesting article I found some time ago - unfortunately I
> converted it a Word doc and no longer have the refs. Also
> http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/making.html and its links make an
> interesting reading
>
> Regards
> Robert T-A
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-- 
Roland Gesthuizen - ICT Coordinator - Westall Secondary College
http://www.westallsc.vic.edu.au

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change
the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has." --Margaret Mead
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