Sway Into Presenting!

This is a tool that the teacher can use to present the lessons. Important elements are: the flexibility, easy integration of many different files, and the sharing. Also, it is very important that students themselves use this tool to benefit their learning because they become creators.

Sway looks like a very interesting and useful app for the classroom. As a frequent digital content consumer, I like the opportunities that this app provides. Students can create reports, stories, and presentations that can showcase their learning in a beautiful and visually appealing way. Even cooler than that is the amount of possibility in creation and the redefinition of assignments that Sway allows students to take advantage of.

As a teacher who still uses presentation tools in my class, I was looking for a program/app that enabled me to create content that was more visually satisfying than Slides or PowerPoint. While at the same time, I was looking for something that was easy to use as well. Sway does that for me. I like to think of it less of a presentation tool, and more as a story creator. I truly love the drag and drop ease that Sway has utilized. No longer do you have to scour the web for usable materials for your story or presentation. Now you can search creative common material, and it provides the citation for you. This makes it amazingly simple (too simple, perhaps?) for students to effectively create a story, to be shared, that they can easily cite and source. The ability to embed social media posts also makes it very friendly for modern day presentations. I love the visual focus that Sway has employed, it is obvious that one of the main goals of the developers was to "make it look good." This is another area that sets Sway apart from other presentation tools. How often have we had students present, and their slideshows just blend into the background? The same templates, the same color scheme. Sway has templates, but when I was watching my students' projects, I wasn't thinking that they looked the same. Honestly speaking, however, I don't know how much I would use the app for a simple presentation. There are no interactive elements, like Slides has integrated, or many other apps that can be used for quizzing or polling. It isn't Nearpod, which means that you can't have a guided presentation, with embedded materials for interaction with the audience. For my specific uses, it works as I need it to. But I would not necessarily jump to switch to use it for simple one-to-many presentations. I would also like to see collaborative tools built into this in the future, both of student-teacher and student-student varieties.