I recently spoke at the course creators engergize conference, hosted by Zenler giving tips on how to make your videos and presentations better for online courses. Why? Let’s face it, most of them are rubbish! 😉
In my presentation I made the observation that to make your videos really pop you should embed yourself as a “talking head” into some of your PowerPoint slides, so that there’s more emotion and engagement. I cheerfully said there was a dirty trick you can use, via Canva because PowerPoint couldn’t do it in a sensible way yet.
Sod’s Law being what it is, I discovered almost immediately after the conference that the new versions of PowerPoint can do this in a relatively painless way… So here’s a quick and dirty video (no rehearsal, no editing) of both options
As you can imagine, with a tiny bit of effort, and a bit of careful design for your slides, so that you don’t put your head on top of anything important, you can make your recorded presentations quite a bit funkier and really go to town on things.
I’ve found this kind of approach really useful in the past, although personally I’ve tended to use Ecamm to do this kind of thing live (Mac only, sorry Windows users). Doing it with Ecamm takes a bit less effort and is a bit more intuitive – it also works live, which is the main reason I use it.