The Big Reveal!

Last week I said that we would look at some sound effects. The right sound effect can provide that extra touch to your button or add a little bit of emphasis to your big reveal. I thought that we could try them out on a new project.

Check out the video below to see what we are going to make.

Did you guess correctly?

I took this photo when I was in London recently. There were several telephone boxes in a row and a few people were gathering around them to take a photo. I thought it would make a good photo to show to a class.

Sometimes you don’t want to show a picture in its entirety. Sometimes you just want to reveal a part of the picture and let your students think about it before the big reveal. It provides a great opportunity for students to talk and share their ideas.

If you want to try making something like this, this video will take you through all the steps.
Fast Forward, Pause, Rewind, and Play the video as much as you want.

Resize the video by clicking on the arrows in the bottom right corner.
The video shows PowerPoint 2013.

Let’s just review a couple of points from the video.

The Animation Pane

This is where you can manage and order your animations.

By right clicking an object in the animation pane you can open the animation options dialog. This is where you can select your sound effects.

Adding Animations

This is where multiple animations can be assigned to one object.

Click on the animations tab and you will see a star with a plus sign. Clicking on this icon lets you add another animation to the same object. It can have a different trigger or the same trigger. You will want to manage them in the animation pane. This is where you can select a second sound effect.

The Selection Pane

This is where you can organize your objects.

By clicking on the ‘eye’ you can hide your objects. Click again and you will unhide them.

So that’s it!

Click on ‘Picture Reveal’ below to download the sample PowerPoint file.

Picture Reveal

Picture Reveal was updated to have 18 squares instead of the original nine. Click on Picture Reveal 2.0 to download the latest version.

The other day someone suggested that I do a post on using links and actions in PowerPoint. It’s a simple and effective way of making your presentation a more interactive experience. Look out for the next post!

Take care!

Afterword

Recently, I was browsing through the Teaching English – British Council website and I came across this blog post written by Sandy Millin.

Sandy is one of the curators at ELTpics and you can find her blog here.

To my complete surprise Sandy wrote a post about the same idea but used a slightly different method. She describes the activity, whereas I show how PowerPoint can be used to produce a showmanship effect. Incredibly though, Sandy gave her blog post the same title. It’s worth checking out!