Story writing #1: Using 'Design Ideas' in PowerPoint to create attractive story backgrounds with Grade 5

I am starting a series of story-writing posts today. This is the first one of three. 

One of the teachers at my school wanted help in publishing stories digitally rather than having the students write them in their books. So we worked together in creating lovely stories in PowerPoint. Powerpoint is a perfect application for publishing stories. In this post I want to suggest a way for a student to use the Bing browser and PowerPoint to create a background for an illustrated, digital story - a background that will vary from slide to slide, but keep to the original theme. 

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:

1.  In PowerPoint create a presentation with around 5 – 8 blank slides.

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.  

 

 

Next steps

Once their presentations had been created, with varied backgrounds, the class added their stories and then set about adding illustrations. That process is for another blog post! But in the meantime - here is a link to the finished stories which i have captured in a Wakelet: https://wke.lt/w/s/epv3qS