Animating in Keynote

I'm putting together a four week Keynote Challenge the library is going to sponsor next fall, working through the IT and Film classes.  I've blogged before about how awesome I think Keynote is, and how under utilized.  Mike Sammartano's Keynote Classroom  YouTube Channel has some great examples of what Keynote can do.

Once the challenge is fully together, I'll post about it. In the meantime, I spent time today (never mind how much!) putting together this quick animation to show how teachers can use Keynote to demonstrate, for example, scientific principles. I still have a few timing kinks to work out, but you get the gist! Though it occurs to me I should add a little jingle to it.



You can download the file here if you want to see how it went together.
If you want to see something that will knock your socks off, watch this.  Entire story done in Keynote.  So add it to your digital storytelling toolbag!

UPDATE:  That blogger widget never seems to work. I uploaded to Youtube instead.

Unlikely (Jonah Ch. 1) from Robert Murphy on Vimeo.

Keynote Book Trailers: Things You Do To Avoid What You Ought To Be Doing...

...but Still Look Like You're Working.

 My favorite tool lately is Keynote.  I'm on a one-woman mission to evangelize the Power Point heathens and spread the word of Keynote's total awesomeness.

I've been playing around with designing slides to look less, well, slide-like, and to mimic Prezi's cool feeling of lateral animation.  It's a great way to create booktrailers without having to mess around with video or finding 1,000 images for Animoto.

Here's the result.


It's all in how you layout the images.  They need to "bleed" off the edge, then you use a "Push" (not "Push Object!")  transition.  For example, in that opening logo, I bled the image halfway off the first slide, then matched it (in reverse) on the second slide.  You can't really see it from the second image, but it IS the same picture, so you can tell it's bleeding off the edge, even if you can't see it.  It took a bit of playing around to match them seamlessly, but not too much!

More importantly, it's  a neat trick to teach students, when you're teaching presentations and slide design.  Death to bullet points, I say!

(btw--I tried doing this in PP, and it doesn't work--though if you can figure out how to make it work there, let me know!)

Anyway, if you want to download the slides, to see how the rest of it went together, click here.

Keynote: Go Interactive

If you're at all interested in you and your students creating interactive content on iBooks Author (and if you're not, why aren't you?), at some point you're going to have to get your head around the Thing of Wonder that is Keynote.

 And that's not just the newly-minted ADE-to-be promoting Apple products.

As soon as we've finished the fine-tuning, I'll post a link to the WWII Home History book the kids created. It is fabulous, if I do say myself. What we're really excited about is the kids' response to it: their empowerment, and the monumental improvement in their writing on just this one project. But more on that later. I promise.

 Back to Keynote.

While iBA provides some nice interactive widgets, most of the REALLY cool ones you see in books are made on Keynote. I thought it was just presentation software; it had some cool design elements (adding shadows and reflections, etc), but I didn't truly understand what it could with with a little imagination and know how. After I realized that everything I spent hours (and $30) creating on Hype, I could have done on Keynote, I determined to figure this out.

So here's the video of an interactive animation on evaluating historical maps.  You can download the file here, if you want to go in to see how I did it.

Anyway, all of this is a very long lead up to sharing Keynote Classroom a great website I found this morning,  hosted by Mike Sammartano, a science teacher near NYC.  He has some quick, fun tutorials exploring some of the advanced features in Keynote, and showing some cool animations he created. One of them inspired me so much, I have a new project to play with this Saturday afternoon.

UPDATE: Hmm. Blogger really isn't liking that video.  Let me upload it to Youtube, and I'll repost.

Keynote Tech Tip: Grab Those Files!

Have you ever dropped something into a Keynote presentation, then needed it for something else? You can't get it out of Keynote, and you can't find it again online? Did you know those .key files are actually just renamed zip files? Me, neither! If you want to grab an image from one of your old Keynote presentation, just change the .key suffix to .zip, and tell the prompt to accept the change. Double click on the zip file, and you now have access to all the separate files that make up your Keynote. Pretty cool, huh?

Presentation Zen Handout

ZEN Handout

Adding the Zen to PreSENtation

Is that lame?  I'm giving several workshops on Presentation Zen next week for our two PGD days.  I spent 10 hours yesterday putting the slides together (geesh!); tomorrow I'll create the handout, and post that when it's finished.  Slides are below.

I called it Presentation Zen, but I would bet money Garr has that copyrighted, so I'm trying to think of a different title I could use.  Not that he cares what some obscure LMS in Outer Mongolia is doing with his brand, I'm sure!  Should I change the "S" in presentation to a Z?  Am I being completely obsessive?

Enjoy the slides. Sorry I can't make it downloadable. Some of the photos are personal permission, rather than CC, so I can't let it float around.  But feel free to use the text or ideas!

Presentation Zen