#TechTipTuesday – Convert Documents to Presentations
On Tuesdays, I share a Tech Tip on our social media pages to assist our staff in their use of technology as it relates to their role.
One thing that I always struggled with in the classroom was student PowerPoint presentations. When offered the option of how students want to share their learning with others it was often a PowerPoint. Now don’t get me wrong, there is nothing inherently wrong with a PowerPoint; for many students it is a comfort medium. However, there are always those students who could spend WEEKS of class time on the design of the slides and not focus on the content. Given that the classes I taught were predominately Social Studies and Science, it was the content that I needed to assess.
Now that I have moved over to the Division Office visual presentations are back in the picture again; this time in the form of stakeholder presentations. Many of the documents we create are quite long but need to be summarized and shared with our Board, principals, staff members, public, etc: budget summaries, policies and procedures, staff support documents, and community reports. We essentially do the work two times while creating a formal report and then the accompanying presentation.
However, did you know that you can easily convert a written document into a presentation with just the click of a button!? This feature is available in both our Office 365 Microsoft platform as well as Canva. See further information below, including video tutorials linked from TikTok:
Convert Word Documents to PowerPoint
Since 2021 users can export a Word Document as a PowerPoint. This means your information is reviewed and a PowerPoint presentation is created automatically. For students, they can now focus on summarizing the content that they know without the distraction of template design. For staff, they can improve their efficiency by creating a secondary report automatically. See this tip in action in the video below:
Convert Docs to Decks in Canva
While originally designed as a graphic design software, Canva introduced written documents in 2022. With this, came the integration of the “convert” feature which allowed users to quickly change the format of that document to a presentation slide deck. When I made this tip video, I decided to add in a bit of an AI-twist as well. It is worth noting that I could have done the AI feature using the AI “magic” tools within Canva, but I know that my audience doesn’t always include educators and the magic tools are a paid feature for those outside the education world.