Digital Resources: emaze

I am a presentation over achiever. I am not above a tasteful animation or a logical sound effect. I firmly believe that the design of the presentation can enhance the message of the presentation (although as a former 8th grade English teacher I can attest to the fact that the opposite is also true - ask any kid who was desperate to get to the end of a slide with 50 spinning animated words to click through). No offense to my white background/black Arial font text users, but even just inverting your colors can really impact your presentation. 

A presentation using the Gallery template, a 3D walkthrough
of your content (this slide will resolve with a close up of
the images on the far wall, which are user-provided images with
captions).

The big drawback to this is that designing a high-quality presentation is time consuming. Coming up with the content can be time consuming, and then to begin the process of designing the presentation to best suit the information is a whole other beast. emaze is online presentation software that provides beautiful templates so that you can focus on generating and organizing content within beautifully designed slides. emaze offers both 2D and 3D slide templates, along with multi-device access and automatic translation so that your presentation can be shared around the world. 

Like many other companies offering online presentation software, emaze offers tiered service. Free packages do not limit you from any of emaze's templates (which is awesome considering that's the thing that really sets them apart from other presentation software), but you are limited from making your presentations private, presenting offline, or downloading your presentations to other file formats (which are all available in the first tier of service, known as "Pro"). Pro service also turns off ads. The second tier of service (Business) gives you analytics, customized brand templates, team management and premium training and support. Educators and students do receive a discount on these services of 50% or more. 

To create an emaze presentation, you can either select a template and fill it with your own information (both visual and textual), you can develop a presentation from scratch or you can "emazify" your PowerPoint presentation. This is a cool feature as it not only incorporates your already-existing information into a new template, but also creates that file online so it is accessible from anywhere you have Internet access. 

Where: emaze.com

Cost: Free (with tiered paid upgrades)

What: template-heavy online presentation software

Students! Try emaze if you...

Are tired of the same old templates in whatever presentation software you are currently using

Want polished, professional templates that are easy to use and access through the web

Teachers! Try emaze if you...

Want to focus on content while still providing information in an engaging and beautiful context

Would like to have presentations available on the cloud (allowing you to work somewhere besides your classroom)