Barry Bakin: So good afternoon, everybody. I am Barry Bakin, and this particular webinar is called Easy Word and PowerPoint Projects for Language Practice, Part 2. So for those of you who have not attended one of my face-to-face workshops or one of the webinars, I am an instructional technology teacher advisor for the Division of Adult and Career Education for the Los Angeles Unified School District, which is a great position.

Basically, it allows me to work with teachers in the classrooms as they implement technology. And of course, part of that has been trying to encourage and assist teachers to use online-based teaching for the last two or three years. And obviously, we've been very, very busy these last several weeks, as that has become a topic of great interest and need.

I am also a subject matter expert for OTAN, and that involves doing similar webinars and face-to-face workshops, which I hope will return at some point in the future. Of course, you already know what-- some of the things that OTAN does, but here's a few other things that you can take a quick look at. And of course, everything is available at otan.us.

So for today's webinar, our objective is that you, as participants, will be able to demonstrate to your ESL, ABE, and academic students several separate projects using Microsoft Word. I should have Word Excel in there as well and PowerPoint. The plan is to get to at least one project using Excel.

But the basic idea is that students can practice vocabulary, grammar, demonstrate mastery of content, but then also learn some of these needed or necessary skills using some of the various Microsoft Office programs. If you have attended the part one project, this may seem a little bit familiar, but I do want to review it because it does talk about some of the-- also some general concepts that are important to me, which is that, in this particular project-- which I used to do at the beginning of every semester for every class-- it was really great for a number of reasons.

I did teach ESL. You, of course, may be teaching something different. But it introduces the students to you. You learned a little bit about them, which is always nice. But most importantly, it always gave me a sense of writing level, because I'm sure as the same with you, it was a level 2 class or it was a level 4 class, but the writing varied tremendously, because most-- for most of my experience, students were placed in classes more on speaking ability than on writing ability.

Some other nice features of this project is it creates a nice archive for you so that you can refer it when students are in the class and you don't quite remember their name. You have the picture and the name. Or even years later when you're visiting other classes and you see them in a different level class, it was always really nice to show them how much their writing had changed over the years.

So it's a really nice project for that reason. It also introduces the idea of drafts. Students would often start on paper for this project, and I could use this as a great introduction to the idea of writing, rewriting, submitting for approval, writing again. And it was really, really great for that, which also comes in handy-- if you ever have a WASC accreditation team visiting your classroom, you can create a display of improvement of student work.

In terms of the program itself, this is a great time to find out what your students know about using a computer. And if they don't know some of the basic things, you're starting to introduce some ideas about saving documents, working with a keyboard, and some of the things that are going to be really, really crucial.

So as with this project and the other projects that we'll be talking about, the new concern, of course, is how can we take this to an online platform? So some of the things that-- for example, that I've considered-- our learning management system, the one that we use in-- not only in Division of Adult and Career Education, but also in Los Angeles Unified School District-- is Schoology.

Of course, you may be using something different, but that may look familiar to some of you. But typically, in all of the learning management systems, there's someplace to include a photo and have some sort of a profile. So that would be one possible way you could easily convert this project into an online form.

Of course, it could also be done as a discussion where students-- they have the photo as part of their profile, and then they can update a discussion. You can also do this is a-- perhaps a shared Google document, perhaps providing a template for them. And then every student would be responsible for a particular page of that shared document so that they're only working on their own document within the larger document.

But of course, nowadays, it's not only important to decide what the actual online option will be-- you also have to take into consideration, what are your options for presenting the directions? How will you present the directions for the project? I can't really go into all of the different ways that instructors are using right now to teach online during this time period.

Just consider what is useful for your own situation use you Zoom or some other camera-based platform to show them as you're working on it. Email the instructions. Place the instructions on your LMS as an assignment. Send them out by way of using remind. Email a template.

Actually, today, we still have the capability to email-- I mean, to mail instructions by putting the instructions into an envelope and sending it on a stamp. So you still have lots and lots of options. I encourage you to think about ways that you will be showing these projects to your student.

So this particular project is called the speech balloon conversations. I find it to be a lot of fun. In the first part of this presentation offered a few weeks ago, weeks we spent quite a lot of time talking about how to do this. I'm not using Word. This time, I'm just going to do that briefly, and then elevate it just a little bit to doing the same project in PowerPoint.

So instead of spending a lot of time on Word today, we're going to move more into using PowerPoint for some of these projects. Basically, what's great about this project-- it's very, very adaptable for all levels, but-- because basically you're requiring them or part of the directions is to include whatever it is that you're studying and then your-- or teaching.

And then your expectation is that the students include that. And so you can be requesting that the particular speech balloon or thought balloon that they use is as sophisticated or as complex as you want. So real quickly, we'll just do a few samples. These are actual student samples, where you get the idea of the difference between using a speech balloon and using the thought balloon.

And so you can see students really get that idea very, very quickly. And almost all of them always included this idea that people sometimes, or most of the time, think something that's different than what they're saying. This one is a particularly biting, if you ask me. I hope it didn't come out of that student's personal experience, but in any case, you can see that they look for the photos. They find something that's interesting. Then they build the conversation.

And again, it can be as sophisticated as you want to require. So I will now just take you into a basic Word doc so that you can see how this is done in a Word document. We're not going to spend a lot of time there because I want to do much more with the same project as a PowerPoint. So I'm going to stop the sure at this moment, and what we're going to do is we're going to change to a Word document.

So hopefully what you're viewing is just the basic Word document, and it's open and it's blank. So one of the things that you'll notice is that this project tends to work better in vertical portrait mode, but it can work in landscape mode. And it's more likely in a PowerPoint later to be in landscape, but I like to start, when I show this, to students as a Word document in portrait mode.

So the first thing, obviously, is a photo. For those of you who are not familiar with Word, basically, you're going to insert a picture. You have an option also though of inserting it from a picture that's already on your computer or going to the web and finding a photo. Probably, in most classroom situations, the students will not have a great collection of photos on their own computer, so you would want them to-- you would want to spend some time showing them how to find suitable pictures using a search engine.

I like to recommend that they select pictures with a lot of characters in them because you have more options for conversation. So I do happen to have a few pictures that are suitable already on the computer, so I'm going to select one and insert it. So there's a picture of a lot of students in the classroom, so that gives a lot of options.

But probably the first thing you notice is that the picture takes up much of the space on the page. So I tell students that, most likely, what they'll want to do is make the picture significantly smaller so that they have room to add some speech balloons. Now, the other thing typically that tends to happen is, when a picture is inserted in Word, then what happens is it comes in as being in line with text.

And for the purpose of this project, it's really much better to be done at the bottom of the page, so the speech balloons naturally appear above the characters. And the way that I find that's easiest to do that for is, instead of selecting in line with text, I want to select the option where the photo floats on top of the page.

So if you notice right now, because the picture is selected, to the right of the picture, there's a little icon representing the way that the picture is displayed. The same icon is also at the top under the Format screen, it says Wrap, and so-- Wrap Text, and so you get some options there. So either way would work. You can either click on the menu item at the top or the menu item at the bottom.

It's called Layout Options. And when you click on that, you get several options. I like to select the one that says In Front of Text. So what that allows me to do is, when I click on that, I can go to the picture and drag it anywhere on the page. So I'm going to place it somewhere down near the bottom. At this point, you can still enlarge or make it smaller if you needed.

This is a good time to point out that, when working with photos, if they grab from a side, then you tend to get a little bit of photo distortion. So it's a good time to show them that if you're going to resize a picture, it may be important to resize it from the corner.

Melinda Holt: Barry, do you have any good sites that you would recommend to find interesting photos, or do you just insert from your desktop?

Barry Bakin: Oh, well usually, as I said, students who are in the lab-- there's not really very many interesting photos on most of those computers, and so I typically would go ahead and just show them a search engine, an image search. But I do give them some tips. So for example, sports, or students, or things with names of people in them tend to have more characters that can speak.

And I show them that when in the classroom. Or in this case, you would have to show them online what types of pictures are more suitable for this particular project. But then again, a cat and a dog-- there's not a lot of people in those as well. So the students will work on it, but I like to find pictures with a lot of samples.

So in any case, the next thing is, how do you actually make those speech balloons? So that also so happens under Insert. And some of you may want to be trying this going along with the-- this particular presentation-- not only by viewing, but actually trying to do some of these things. Just make sure you have a couple of windows open side by side so that you can follow the presentation as well as do it on your own computer.

So in any case, the what-- those objects are called speech balloons, and you find them under Shapes. In Word, they're called Call Outs. So there's quite a few of them. When you click on the Shapes menu, you get several types of shapes. The ones that I find most useful are down at the bottom.

Call Outs are just the first four. You have a rectangular one, a rectangular Call Out with curved corners, an oval, and a-- the speech cloud. So let's pick an oval-- move my cursor up for the paper and draw the speech balloon. What sets this apart from many shapes is you can go ahead and automatically just start to type, because these speech-- these Call Outs are actually text boxes.

But of course, right away, you can see why the text is very, very small. However, just like any text box, you can highlight that. You get your menu that pops up for the size, so you change the font size. You should be able to change the color of the text.

And if you click on the box itself, you also can change the fill, the color of the speech balloon itself. And so these are nice little techniques that you can show your students about working with the text and the shape-- how to change the color and the shape. Now, how do you change the size and make it useful?

Well, you've got handles. These are also good scales for students. You've already shown them how to use the handles to adjust the size of the photo. So a lot of these things are scaffolding, so you can change the shape just by dragging. In this particular case, you may want to make the shape fit onto the page better.

The yellow one is one that can-- you can actually move. And that one controls the arrow-- who's doing the talking. So I'll just do one more. We'll do one with the thought balloon. So again, it's Insert, Shapes. Notice there's also the recently used shape. It's right up there at the top. That's the one I most recently used. But I'm going to go down and get the cloud-- draw my cloud.

Barry, what does the anchor do?

Oh, well, I don't know. It appears when I click on the shape.

It actually means that the object will float with the text, as if you move the text down, but you don't have any text, so no worries.

OK. So in this case, so-- and you want to show students-- you want to make sure that they realize that they're not cutting off the-- any part of the text. There you go. Finally, with this project, the last thing that I'd like to include is, somewhere on the page, I always tell my students to insert a text box.

So just select Text Box. I pick a simple one. And what I'm going to do with this one is just-- I tell students to put their name, put the name of the class, put a date, if they're not embarrassed I tell them to put their teacher name. And then I have them just place it somewhere at the bottom.

This one too-- also notice you want to select the same thing, In Front of Text, so you move it anywhere that you want. And basically, that's the project. So let me go back now. Well, first of all, let me ask if there are any more questions about those specific techniques for using Word for this project. And Melinda, if you don't mind, if you could check the Q & A.

Sure. You've gotten most questions answered. There is one, "No audio?," and I believe that person is asking, can you do audio as well as all of the bubbles and what have you? Or is that more in tune with slides?

It never occurred to me about using audio with a Word document, but we will touch upon that when we get into using PowerPoint GIFs. So if there are no further questions about this particular project, let me go ahead and stop the share and go back to the presentation. I'm not going to spend too much time on this particular slide because I do want to show you the actual project.

So this is where the audio comes in. And again, what I always am reminded of when I see this is that this project was presented to students always originally as a Word document. And I did not suggest to this particular student to come back and do it as a PowerPoint, but your students will surprise you, and they have a lot more skills than you may think.

And sure enough, the student came back with this. You can see that this is a four-- they took that same idea and they turned it into a PowerPoint. Now you have four conversations, or four things being said or couple being thought each on a separate slide. So what I'm going to do is see if I can transfer over to the actual student project.

[audio playback]

- Having this baby was our dream.

- I love you and the baby so much, dear. I wonder if it's my baby.

[end playback]

Barry Bakin: So I hope that the sound did make it through on that. So what I'm going to do now is we're going to start-- let's go back to the presentation for just a moment. So this could be a nice introduction to using PowerPoint for students, and sort of an introduction to the idea that many, many things or many, many techniques that they've learned in Word will transfer over to using PowerPoint or some of the other programs in the Microsoft Office Suite universe.

So if they know from the very, very first project how to insert a picture, or from doing the cluster balloons, how to insert a picture, then it's very easy to progress from that to doing it as a PowerPoint project. So let me go ahead and we'll get a new PowerPoint window. What I've done here is I've just created the basics of a first slide. Everything would pretty much be the same as if they learned it in Word.

You have the Insert, and then you have a choice of inserting a picture or something from online. And so basically, again, the idea is find a picture with a lot of people-- even though, again, that's not necessary. And also notice I've already put the student name, the name of the art, the class, the school name, the teacher name, and the date.

And so this is my first slide. And so a really important part of doing this-- the technique that's really important is doing-- making a duplicate of this slide each time so that the picture always stays in the same place. So I'm going to go ahead, and this will be the first slide. I do want to still do Insert.

It's in the same place-- insert a shape and pick a Call Out. Insert it as we did before, and start typing. I'll make the-- make it a little bit bigger I'll make the text. a little bit bigger. All right, so at this point, you want to show your students that they have a couple of options. One option would be you could build the conversation with each slide.

So if you want to see this speech balloon in the next slide, then what I'm going to do is, while the slide is selected, I go to New Slide and I select Duplicate Selected Slides. And what that does is it puts the exact same slide in the order. So here's the first slide. Here's the second slide. It looks exactly the same.

So in this method, what they've done is they still have this, and they could insert another shape, another Call Out. So now maybe we'll change it for a different color. Again, all of these techniques are the same as if you teach them in Word first.

So if we're here at the first slide, then it would move to the second slide. So you could have the option of keeping this or not, but let's say you do want it to change completely. You just delete it. So now the first slide is here. The second slide is here.

So the next step, of course, would be about the, how did the students get sound into their presentation? So under Slide Show, you have a button for recording. This is a little bit complex-- I don't want to go into it now and do the creation-- but you can start recording-- they can create all of their slides and then record it as one unit. Then they can go in and change it.

But that's how you get the sound into the slides. Start recording from the beginning. But you also have an option of recording each individual slide, and that's basically what happens with converting this particular project to a PowerPoint. So what I'd like to do is stop that and continue with the next project.

Another project-- again, all of these projects are because I was an ESL teacher for so many years-- had to do with practicing the grammar, or vocabulary, or some other thing that-- topic that we studied in class. This one is called the photo grammar. And basically, the idea here is to-- whatever topic that you're studying, just have them find a picture.

That old saying, a picture's worth a thousand words-- well, you don't need them to write thousand words. You just want to basically get a sentence. In this particular project, simple, compound, complex, and adverbs of frequency-- it's only called that because that's what we were studying. And so they were practicing. If you notice, the first sentence is a simple sentence.

The sunsets are wonderful. This next sentence is compound. I like the beach, but I like going in the afternoon more. And then, although I like to go to the beach, the sea scares me, and then-- as a complex. And then the last one, there's actually a combination. It's both the compound and complex. So in any case, that was the idea here-- again, reinforced vocabulary, grammar, or content learn.

By this time, hopefully they're more able to do this on their own. And then it's also possible that students can turn this into a PowerPoint. So if we take a look at it, again, here, this is a student project practicing with modals, and you can see that they had-- I just took a screenshot of three slides, but this-- the actual presentation as it has many more. And let me just give you a quick view of that particular project as well.

[audio playback]

- When I was young, I could swim very fast.

[end playback]

Barry Bakin: Melinda, how did that work?

Melinda Holt: Perfect.

Barry Bakin: OK.

[audio playback]

- All voters must be citizens of the United States. May I use your laptop?

[end playback]

Barry Bakin: OK, so I'm going to stop that right there. And obviously, is this a project for your level 1 students? No. But could it be a project for much higher level students, or basic language arts students, or even some academic students using PowerPoint to display something that they've learned along with narration? And so again, very, very adaptable-- here's, again, another PowerPoint project, again, using tenses.

But the idea here is also to review different tenses over multiple slides. Again, in this one, the technique that you'd want to show your students, as I mentioned earlier, is copying an existing slide-- duplicating an existing slide. Because when the transformations take place-- for example, switching from present continuous to simple past-- if you don't duplicate the location of the photo, if you don't duplicate the location of the sentences, then the transition looks very jumpy and things jump around all over the place.

But if you actually duplicate the slide between-- you create the present continuous affirmative declaration slide-- Olga's talking on the telephone, Olga is calling her daughter-- when it makes the transition to the simple past, it's almost like magic, because the picture doesn't jump around and the verb is talking-- magically changes to talk. It's really quite a lot of fun.

So again, that's using the duplicate slide function. It's really quite a nice feature. Let's go ahead and talk about the next one. This is called the making coffee project. It's an introduction to sequences. If you happen to be a CTE teacher or any teacher that you're involved with a subject that involves doing something in order, this is a great project for getting students to break down the sequence of events.

So in this particular case, I call it the making coffee project only because that's what is being shown in this display. If you look at the photos, it's broken down into very discrete components of something that takes a lot of steps. But you may notice that, in this introduction, the steps are not in order. They're scrambled.

And so the idea is at the first presentation, try to present it scrambled and work with the students to change it to the actual order. So again, let me stop the share for a moment, and we'll go to the actual project. So in slide sorter view, what you get are all the slides and no work area.

So in this particular case-- I think I must have actually solved that one. But you can see what I'm doing right now. I'm moving the slides around. That was the solved version. But what do you want to do is show the students first the scrambled version, and then invite them with whatever method-- if you're using Zoom or if you just give them this, and say please, put-- move the slides back, save it again, and then resend it to me in the correct version. That's what you would do.

And so obviously, right now-- and perhaps you can help me. And there may be more than one correct answer for this particular project. Let's see if we can put them back into the correct order. Marjorie, if you're on deck at the moment, what are people saying in the chat? Which slide would go first?

Marjorie: One person says I is first. Next person says H.

Barry Bakin: OK, so again as the students are responding...

Marjorie: C, A, H--

Barry Bakin: ...as teacher, you're actually moving these things around. Do we have any other different--

Marjorie: Looks like everybody is-- A, H, H, H, C--

Barry Bakin: People are disagreeing with I being first?

Marjorie: Majority of the responses are H.

Barry Bakin: OK.

Marjorie: Then someone says next is C. Someone else says F should go before I.

Barry Bakin: OK.

Marjorie: Next person says H after E.

Barry Bakin: H after E-- well, we can try it.

Marjorie: Next up, we're seeing G. Someone says H. She looks like she can have a cup of coffee. Next says G after F. Someone else says move G. Then we have a G, I. H could be waiting for coffee to brew. And then someone else says B is last.

Barry Bakin: OK, so first B and then E-- B, E?

Marjorie: Someone says E after D.

Barry Bakin: E after D--

Marjorie: Someone else says, yes, D, E.

Barry Bakin: OK. I think I would agree that, looking at the state of coffee, the amount of coffee in the cup, I think it definitely has to go before E. But in any case, so that's the project. That's the idea. As a conversation starter, I don't think we're going-- obviously, there can be some disagreements, but that would be the ideal way to introduce the project.

And then, again, as I said, if they know how to narrate, they know they could narrate the slides, if you've already taught them that. And then they save it and send it back to you saved with their name so that you know. Obviously, the next step is, depending on what class you're teaching, you want to leverage this into making it something that the students do. Let me just show you an example of a student project. So the steps for making paper flowers-- take a look at this project.

What do you think about that? Believe me, I was astounded. Translate that to your own CTE classes and see if you think that may be something that your students could do and present. And really, all they're doing-- basic, basic technique. Insert a photo and then make a comment. And of course, if they wanted to, they could add the narration.

So in this case, this is the student research project. If you were a participant in the first workshop, we didn't have quite as much time to work with it, so hopefully we'll have more than enough time to take a look at this project now. This is not a project for the first week, the second week, or even the fourth or fifth week of your semester.

I always viewed this as a culminating project after they'd been with me for almost the whole semester at the different m and they were able to-- they had a lot of practice with using Word, using PowerPoint. I would introduce them to this project. And this was a speaking project and a way for them to also learn some very, very basic ideas about using Excel.

But then again PowerPoint-- and as part of a speaking project, it meant presentation in front of the class. So let me show you a particular student sample so you can get a good idea of what the actual project was. So this is an actual student project. It was a research project. This would be the first slide.

One of the students would be presenting-- speaking in front of the class. Our project is, what color underwear were the students in Mr. Bakin's and Mr. Buczko's class wearing on August 3, 2010? And I'll get back to that in just a second-- why that particular type of question? But the idea would be that they had actually created a chart in-- using Excel, and then put that into the PowerPoint presentation.

And then they would be speaking about that and giving their ideas about their conclusions about the most popular color underwear from the students in Mr. Buczko's and Mr. Bakin's class on that particular day was the color black, and surprisingly enough, there were three students not wearing underwear, et cetera, et cetera. So they would be presenting their research findings.

Then the next slide is always, do you have any questions? And at that point, the audience would try to bring up as many questions as they could related to the presentation, and then the students would have to answer. So that was the presentation. Let me just show you a few other examples of the types of questions.

So these are just the Excel charts so you can see the types of research questions. And also, notice the variety of charts displayed. It's all really the same when we get into Excel, but they could choose how they want to display the ideas.

So basically, though, you can see there's so many different types of charts and questions that students came up with. But the one common denominator that I insisted upon is it couldn't be something that a student could determine by visual observation. So in that first project, color underwear was OK. What color shirt was not OK.

And the way I ensured that was, as part of the process for doing this project, the student-- and I would have them work in teams-- the students would have to think of their question and then give me the question. And I did that for two purposes-- so that, one, I could make sure that they would actually have to use language to carry out the research and collect the data, and two, I didn't want everybody doing the same project, because again, they were going to be presenting these in front of the class.

And so I kept a chart and I made sure that every student team had a unique topic. So sometimes I'd have to send them back and say, somebody's already doing this particular project. And then the other experience that I had-- another way that I improved this project over time is for the presentation component of this. Let me just get back to one photo that I have of the students actually doing this presentation.

So again, students would stand in the front of the class. They'd have the PowerPoint up on the projector. That was part of it, that they have to set it up. I would always do a special presentation-- where do you stand if you're standing in a classroom-- basically so that the presenter's not talking to the screen. Nowadays, of course, that may involve some techniques about doing the Zoom presentation or some other type of presentation using online methods.

The partner was advancing the slides, and then they'd switch places. And it was really an end-of-the-year project that created a lot of nervousness and excitement. Basically, I was teaching level 3 ESL at this time when I was doing most of these, and I found that the students did very well with presenting and stating the outcomes of their research, but as an audience, they could not ask questions.

It was just enough for them to be able to present. And so finally, what I started to do is invite upper level classes-- the level 5's and level 6 classes. And some of them had actually been in my class, so they were familiar with this process to be the audience. So my level 3 students were presenting to higher level student, because they were not-- they'd get to the question part, and there were no questions because the students couldn't formulate questions about what they'd seen.

But the level 5 and level 6 students were able to formulate questions, and it really added a much greater component, and believability, and stress level for my students who were presenting to know that they were presenting to an actual class that would be asking them questions. It was always quite exciting. So I would like to talk a little bit about using Excel for this because that may be something that you have not done. But before we do that, are there any questions in general about this idea?

Audience: So Barry, let me just ask you a question about the flower project that you showed us a little while ago.

Barry Bakin: Sure.

Audience: So the question is, is this a project that the students did to teach a skill, or was it something you just used to teach them order of a process?

Barry Bakin: So getting back to that one, in that particular case, the language component was just expressions expressing order. So it was really after, next-- and that's what they were really looking for-- or that's what I was really looking for. But in the case of that one student, they took it in a whole different direction.

So I include it because, if we do have CTE teachers in attendance, they may not be as interested in the language component-- the language piece of it as more as the steps piece of it. OK, so let me go ahead and share the screen again with the-- an Excel project. What you should be seeing now this was an actual student project in Excel, and I'm showing it to you now so that you can see basically what it involves.

In order to create a very, very simple graph, all you really need are two columns. In the first column, you list the names. That would be the categories. And the second column, you list the amounts. And so what I had students do is, first, they would just do this on paper. They'd walk around with their notebook, and after checking in with me about the topic-- and perhaps I would give them a few suggestions about what would perhaps be a better choice.

And they would ask the students. So in this case, obviously, what is your favorite car? And they would collect that data and presented in tabular form, or hash marks, or however they wanted to count. And then demonstrating-- all you need-- first column, you just typed in the names-- second column, you type in the numbers. And that's all they needed.

What do you do to get the chart? Well, basically, you're showing the students you just put your cursor over the first cell, A1-- and you can use that term or not-- and you scroll down so that you're selecting all the names, and then you just move over one column so that all the names and all the numbers are highlighted. And then right away, you get the little icon for the chart, quick analysis.

But also, you can always do the Insert a Chart-- so again, under Insert a Chart. And then, when you pick, you have some choices. So you notice what I'm doing? Even as I just highlight a choice, it appears within the Excel spreadsheet. So for most purposes, the simple column was the best. You can see that there are other styles that you can pick-- all different types of-- for the same data, you can do a pie chart. You can do other sorts of things.

But for most of the students, it was enough just to do a column chart. They didn't really need to get into the more complicated ones. And you select it, and OK, and there it is. So then chart title-- just show them. Just click on it, and then you can replace the name.

You don't have to, but I would always have a little discussion about the fact that this data was only good on a particular date, if they only collected the data on a particular date. But that's something that you can decide is important or not important. Then some of the things that are available in the chart that students got a real kick out of is that you can change-- in this case, the one I chose gave different colors automatically.

But if you click on the different columns, you can change that on your own. And one of the things that was thought a lot of fun for students in some cases-- if you click on one and select it, and then right-click on it, under the Fill, I would show them that they could select Picture. See?

Let's just do a search for-- I guess that's a Honda, right? Let's see if we can find a Honda CRV picture. Let's see. I like this one. Let's do that one. Insert it. See what happens? That was really cool. Students really liked that, and they were able to have a lot of fun and also learn a cool little technique.

And there are other things that you can do to change the way the item-- the chart works. But basically, when it's highlighted, if you right-click on it, you can copy the chart. And then, once you're in your PowerPoint presentation, you just paste it right into the slide. So that was really all that was necessary for the students to do this project, because they'd already learned-- that was the new item, doing the Excel.

They'd already work with PowerPoint in the class several times. Now the new component, the new skill that you're scaffolding in, is working with Excel a little bit-- some very basic skills with Excel-- and then working with the chart, and copying the chart from within Excel, and pasting it into the PowerPoint slide. So again, a lot of fun for a projected-- it involves so many things that I felt were important-- a speaking component, doing the research, talking to the other students, working together in a pair and a team, and actually doing a presentation in front of an audience using some skills that they may find helpful in higher level classes, or even in a job.

OK, well, that does bring us pretty much the end of the presentation, so let me go ahead and open it up to questions about this project, or questions about any of the projects, or any question that I think I can answer.

Audience: So Barry, we do have a question that's kind of relevant to the situation we find ourselves in now, now that we're doing remote teaching and learning. So the question is, obviously, Barry taught his students these computer steps in a classroom. In our remote setting now, how might Barry suggest that we teach our students using these computer steps in order for them to do these projects?

So we're on Zoom, where the teacher shares the screen and students try to practice along. Or do you have some other ideas about how you might do this kind of instruction in a Zoom setting?

Barry Bakin: Well, again, everything depends on your own skills with online teaching, but yes, Zoom-- just as we're doing this by Zoom, if your students are joining you at times on Zoom, that is certainly a way that you could do the instruction part of it. If you feel up to creating your little instructional video using YouTube, or Screencast-O-Matic, or any of those options for creating how-to videos, you can send them to YouTube to watch.

Also, you could, again-- by sharing templates where all the students have to do is substitute their own information, that could be helpful. And again, it depends. I wouldn't do this class in person in a face-to-face setting if I didn't think they had the capabilities already, and so that's another factor.

Teachers at my organization, teachers in my school now-- even in getting them onto Zoom is going to be a problem because we have certain security restrictions in place, and we've been advised not to do open Zoom meetings with students outside of our LMS, so-- for security reasons, because only students have a login to the LMS.

And again, so these are all different things that you have to consider for your own teaching situations. This project may be insurmountable at this particular time for you, but if you're working with a CTE class, they may already be very, very familiar with these things. And so again, some people are using remind and sending out text messages.

So if you feel like you have the time to do a step-by-step instruction, you could produce a step-by-step instruction, post it online somewhere as a Google document or whatever system your school has, and then send them a text message that just says, go here, and read the instructions, and submit your assignment. Obviously, I'm sure that you found a value to watch me do some of the things on Zoom.

So if that's within your capability and you have students who can do that, then by all means. If you're just limited to sending out text messages because all you have is a phone number, this may not be the best project. I'm welcome, if somebody else in the chat would like to suggest some other methods that I haven't discussed. Any further questions?

Audience: Just a note that, when you were doing that, Barry, that there's a checkbox for Creative Commons pictures only-- so if people do have those copyright concerns or licensing concerns, they certainly can limit their search to just Creative Commons license photos.

Barry Bakin: That's a great suggestion.