Planning and structuring good visual communication can give an edge to your presentations, even at school. Slides can be great allies for both teachers and students, but also for school leaders.
In fact, we could use them for events such as open days or seminars, or for in-person or remote lessons, as study notes, to prepare homework in class, quizzes or tests to be done at home, or as information material to be given to parents.
There are many details to take care of and choices to make to produce effective and engaging slides and some issues need to be resolved well before getting to work. But the first question that probably came to mind is: What is the best platform for school use?
There is no universal answer; it depends on the purpose of the presentation, the style you want to convey and also on the previous knowledge you have of these platforms.
There are many tools on the market for creating good slides, so many that the risk is not being able to understand when it is best to use a certain program and when to use another. In this article, I would like to give you some advice for associating the correct tool with your educational or informational purpose.
Creative Tools
There are many online tools that offer numerous valid solutions to help us in the production of aesthetically satisfying materials, such as Canva and Google Slides. They can be used to quickly create and expertly design graphic projects with a fresh, young, and professional impact or to take creative ideas and stimulate one’s creativity.
Tools for engaging, animated materials
These online tools have very different potentials, but they have in common the ability to be extremely interactive and engaging and, obviously, very easy to use. Some have pre-set commands that allow you to insert links into pre-set graphic cages to make the consultation of additional information or in-depth materials spontaneous and immediate.
Others have templates already built to create lively and dynamic quizzes and even real games that you can adapt to your teaching needs. Still others allow you to build slides with very accurate animation and transition effects that make a simple presentation seem like a small video or an experience in immersive reality.
Classic tools
There is a widespread feeling that classic slide graphic design tools are outdated and uncreative. In reality, if you use these programs, such as Microsoft Powerpoint or Google Slides, you start from the assumption that it is the user who creates his own graphic style in an original way, a step that presupposes specific skills, including a greater initial creative effort.
In the same way, however, with good inventiveness and clear ideas on the structure of the contents, it will be possible to create presentations suitable for any context , formal or informal, interactive or classic, that always satisfy your communication needs.
Institutional and formal documents such as Slides for Open Days, price lists, formal communications to parents, summaries and study notes with a large presence of text and group work.
My suggestion
I recommend experimenting with the tools and platforms available on the web because they often offer free, highly customizable and effective “semi-finished” solutions that allow you to create digital materials of the highest quality and impact in a short time.
Furthermore, even just browsing through these platforms allows you to stimulate creativity and train your “aesthetic taste”. Remember, however, that even learning to use tools like these well always takes some time.
However, be careful not to rely completely on “creative” programs. It often happens that in order to be able to use a certain layout or a particular animation we are forced to modify in a forced or unforeseen way what we want to communicate.
Aesthetics or entertainment as an end in itself are not enough to make a presentation effective. On the contrary, the study of the content must always come first. It is the presentation that must adapt to what I want to say, in the strategic way in which I want to say it, and not vice versa.