Student Presentation on an iPad

By Wesley Fryer On February 27, 2011 · · 2 Comments

Students in my “Technology 4 Teachers” classes at the University of Central Oklahoma are currently sharing “pecha kucha” style presentations during the first part of each class for several weeks until everyone has an opportunity to share. These “Presentation Zen” influenced presos include 20 slides, each shown for 20 seconds each, and are supposed to be full-screen images with a minimum of on-screen text. Students use an online peer-evaluation form I created with Google Forms to provide feedback for each other during each presentation. Last week, for the first time, one of my students shared her presentation using her iPad.

Since the topic of her presentation was music, she wanted to include different music clips as background audio during her presentation. She had experimented with Keynote, but found it easier to just create her presentation in iMovie setting a default duration of 20 seconds for each image.

From a technical standpoint, the only special piece of equipment she needed (in addition to her iPad) was a $30 iPad Dock Connector to VGA Adapter. Since videos played on the iPad support VGA-out functionality, we just plugged in her iPad to the room’s VGA connector, plugged the external speakers into the iPad’s headphone jack, and then pressed play on her video to start her presentation.

I was delighted to see this presentation configuration work well. While most applications on an iPad or iPhone / iPod Touch won’t display on an external projector without special software that requires a jailbreak, thankfully videos WILL display out to a projector on a standard iPad.

For more resources related to “Pecha Kucha” presentations, see my T4T Pecha Kucha page for this semester’s class.

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