Presentations in The Digital Era - Kyle Carwell

 

    Presentations in the digital era need to be able to grab the focus of the viewers while also presenting concise and important information.  Some of the options that are commonly used to do this are Prezi, Canva, and Microsoft Power Point. These websites offer a wide variety of tools and formats for a user to make a presentation for their needs. In particular the website that caught my interest among these while researching about presentation tools was Prezi as I had used it a few times in the past and I was excited to examine more of its features. Prezi offers a wide variety of free templates to choose from when making your presentation. The tools at the top of the presentation provide an easy to access to many different resources, whether that be simply adding images, audio, gifs, or changing the entire layout of the presentation. 

    Another important factor of presentations is the platform on which they are presented on. Over the past few years, we have seen a variety of these platforms form or gain popularity for education purposes. Some of these platforms consist of Zoom, Discord, Microsoft Teams, and Skype, each of which give different benefits and ways that a user can speak to their colleagues, students, and associates. The platform that I looked into more for this presentation is discord as most of the other platforms I have used for education purposes but, I have not had the opportunity to use discord for educational purposes. 

    Discord features servers in which you can add people to and create communities with. In discord you can create roles dedicated to specific groups such as students and create voice chat rooms or text chats that people with that role can see and participate in. Another way roles in discord can be used is by using the @ symbol in front of a role in order to send a message out to everyone with that role and it will give them a notification that they have been specifically talked to. When you make a discord server you can create various text channels and voice channels to be used. Text channels can be made so that only certain roles can see them allowing for information to be distributed to either leaders of groups or everyone at once. The voice chats in discord allow for you to share your screen, start your camera, and speak with others with good quality audio. Discord overall seems like a great way to interact, gain feedback from, respond, and spread information to the community that you create.

References

TLA Team. "Discord for Education." Youtube, 25 Mar. 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a13YeANDGtc

Prezi. "How to make a Presentation." Youtube, 30 Aug. 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWeXc0nwObc