“Death by PowerPoint” is a common affliction these days. The program was created during the heyday of Web 1.0, or the consumer web (wherein information was provided on the internet simply for the viewers to “consume;” group creation and participation was rare until the slow introduction of forums and discussion boards). PowerPoint is Microsoft multimedia at it’s finest, and suddenly, every organization was conducting presentations and in-service using PowerPoint.
Over time, as most things do that progressively grow in popularity, more and more adopters began over-using the program in very incorrect ways . I have personally encountered 50+ slides in one presentation, tiny words shoved into one slide, presenters reading word for word on each slide, horrible clip art, and even worse, words and images that disappear off the slide due to inappropriate sizing.
Following the advent of Web 2.0 and the collaborative internet, you would have thought that PowerPoint would keep up with the times, right? Well, sadly, the only major change to our presentation files of old was the extension change from .ppt to .pptx (which, incidentally, was quite the annoying change for us teachers when our students sent projects on the new PowerPoint that we couldn’t open in our old version of PowerPoint).
Well, I’ve encountered information which reveals that you CAN make those PPT files more interactive!
Thanks to this blog post from Timo Elliott, you can download what essentially amounts to PowerPoint extensions (requiring PowerPoint for Windows and Adobe Flash, which does mean that it won’t work for most Apple products) that integrates Twitter tools, as well as some nifty graphic interfaces, into your presentation. Even niftier is the fact that there is nothing to install; the download itself is a PowerPoint file from which you simply need to copy and paste what you want into your own presentation, and BLAMO! — Twitterific interactive presentation at your service.
I’ve tested out each of the nifty features provided by Timo on his blog, and they are great fun, super useful, and fully functional. In fact, I just used the zooming keywords feature today at a presentation I gave for the School of Education at Georgia Gwinnett College.
So, now that we can integrate Twitter into our PowerPoint presentations to make them more collaborative and interactive, perhaps my own colleagues might finally pay attention to both Twitter as a professional development tool as well as the importance of preventing “Death by PowerPoint.” One can only hope!
You can download the PPT that contains all the Twitter tools here, and you can read the “How To” instruction post here. Happy PowerPoint-ing!
(P.S. Timo Elliott even has Twitter tools for Prezi! You should give those a try as well. Remember: Interaction means that your audience is engaged!)



I am super excited and very honored to be recognized by the amazing leaders, including the current and former Poobahs, of SIGVE. May’s selection of blog nominees came from blogs featured at this year’s Virtual Worlds in Best Practices in Education Conference a few weeks ago (about which I have several posts that I need to publish!).










On this picture to the left, I have placed my thumb on the circle which “activates” the dimensional map which is, in reality, based on the real map where I live. Every few minutes, there are pieces of Quantum Cells that I collect to charge up my special “beam.”

















