Haiku Deck

Fairly recently our school added PowerPoint/Keynote to the already great Speech class that all frosh take, and last year freshmen began to take a course called Design Foundations, an art course that also encompasses design for electronic media. Fantastic stuff. But, my current 80 freshmen won't see any of this until next semester.

This is one reason I was excited to discover Haiku Deck this summer. My students have begun a little project in which they will, I hope, review and present in a graphic form some of what they have learned in the first section of our book. I don't want to spend a lot of time teaching things they will learn soon enough, but I did introduce them to the concept of Creative Commons and needing permission to use photos that might be displayed on the internet.

Haiku Deck takes care of that, so they don't have to. It's possible to search only for CC photos. A link automatically appears displaying the photographer's name, and another link connects to the photographer's Flickr page for full information.

In terms of design, students will learn, next semester, to Keep It Simple... Sweetie. Haiku Deck does that, too. The amount of information that can be placed on a slide is limited, so there will be no slides packed with words; I am hoping students will be forced to synthesize information they have learned. If they choose good photos, the likelihood of a nicely designed, good-looking slide "deck" is great -- I think!

I'm looking forward to seeing the results within the next couple of days. As much as I love Haiku Deck, I am thinking that when I have second-semester freshmen I will do this particular project with Keynote so that students can practice their newly-learned skills from the previous semester.