Write stories that can be published
One of the things that I love doing in my classes is
getting the students to write stories and publish them in different ways. I've always been of the opinion that
it's such a pity to write a story at school and then let it just 'disappear into
nothingness' in an exercise book. Why not get it published digitally, and share it with
the world! My classes all have blogs, so they are able to publish the finished
products on their blogs.
Use PowerPoint for writing stories
Microsoft PowerPoint is a great tool for writing stories.
Our students use mainly Chromebooks so we used
the online Office and PowerPoint which they sign into with their Microsoft
accounts. (Our school is in the throws of getting Office 365 for the learners –
I can’t wait!).
Create backgrounds using 'Design Ideas' in PowerPoint
The wonderful thing about using PowerPoint is that it has
a feature called Design Ideas. So every time you insert an image into a slide,
Design Ideas comes into play down the right side and gives all sorts of suggestions
for placing the image on the slide. Consequently you can use one background
image in a variety of ways. Here is an example:
How to create varied backgrounds
My class was writing a story about ‘Three wishes’ so, after the story had been planned, they needed to prepare a presentation in PowerPoint and create suitable backgrounds for the story on their slides.
This is how to go about it:
2. Go to Insert/ Pictures/ Online pictures
3. This automatically opens the Bing Browser which you
can set to only include Creative Commons images which are free to use. Type in,
for example, ‘Clipart nature scene’.
4. Choose one and select Insert
You'll notice that 'Design Ideas' immediately goes into play and suggests ideas. Choose from these ideas.
Examples of backgrounds
Here are a few examples of backgrounds my class created using 'Design Ideas'. Take a look through. They created around 8+ different backgrounds, in the same theme, with each image.
