This week students undertook a 4-day project creating their own “Choose your own adventure” stories.

This project was a great opportunity to revisit the concepts of “design” and “content” that we discussed when building web pages back in November. PowerPoint was a great tool for this lesson – we used hyperlinks that allow the viewer to choose what path a story should take.

On day 1, students were introduced to PowerPoint. We pointed out similarities and differences between the program and others in the Microsoft Office suite. We learned to save documents, add new slides, insert hyperlinks and add content.

On day 2, students learned to make global design changes (background, font selection, etc) and how to change individual slides while fine tuning their story content.

On day 3, we took a step back and created a visual representation of our PowerPoint slides using Inspiration, an inexpensive brainstorming/outlining program. This program teaches us to input our thoughts and ideas in either a word-based or graphic-based manner and swap back and forth between the two views.

Day 4 was used for finishing touches and catch up.

Overall a fun time was had and we learned some great tech skills in the process! Next week we’ll look at different methods of presenting our work using file export functions, and also how design and content fit into the Berlo’s SMCR model of communication.