Learning how to learn

Tag: presentation

  • Displaying Tweets Real-time with PowerPoint Presentation: With or Without Moderation

    Displaying Tweets Real-time with PowerPoint Presentation: With or Without Moderation

    Recently, our organization decided to implement real-time tweet displaying along with our PowerPoint based Base Camp and Leadership Summit training. We will be displaying the tweets at the training site on the big screens. Therefore, I investigated eight different tweet displaying services to determine what is the best option to do it.

    My first intuition was to embed tweets directly inside of the PowerPoint presentations. Simply by Googling, I found the highest ranked tutorial for doing so by Liz Gross at her blogsite. Following her instruction, I tested out all the Tweet-displaying services listed in her post, plus three more: Twubs, TweetWall, Tweet Chat, and Hootfeed. I use the PowerPoint 2013 Pro. My testing result shows that among the eight choices, only three of them were able to be correctly displayed within the PowerPoint, which are: TwitterBeam, Hootfeed, and TweetFall. All the others show error messages such as “script error” or “Jason not defined”.

    Since for PowerPoint 2013 users, in addition to the steps mentioned by Liz’ blog post, it took extra `steps for me to set up the tweet webpages so that they will display in the PowerPoint. I wonder whether this is the reason why more than half of the tweet services were able to correctly display within the PowerPoint. So I think it is worth to sharing the process for others to learn from.

    First of all, the download link for the free LiveWeb Add-in is missing from the How-to Geek tutorial. It is easy to find, but just in case, you can go here: http://skp.mvps.org/liveweb.htm#.VEASLfldV8E

    Second, for PowerPoint 2013, you will have to manually change the registry subkey for each computer that your PowerPoint would display the embedded Tweet feeds from. To do this, follow the instruction here.

    Third, remember to save your PowerPoint as “.pptm” format (PowerPoint Macro-Enabled Presentation).

    After doing all the above, only one commercial service and two free services fully support displaying Tweet feeds inside of Powerpoint (at least it is the situation for Powerpoint 2010 and PowerPoint 2013). They are:

    TwitterBeam:

    TweetBeam

    Hootfeed:

    HootFeed

    and TweetFall:

    TweetFall

    TweetFall claims not officially supporting PowerPoint embedding. However, their first layout design would work when embedded with PowerPoint, and their price is good:

    TweetWall

    Below is a table comparing the main features of these tweet displaying services:

    Tweet Displaying service Moderation Pricing Embed in PowerPoint Adding Company logo
    TwitterBeam Yes Contact them for price Yes Yes
    TweetWall Yes $58 per day only the first layout works Yes
    Twubs Yes $99 per month No Yes
    TweetFall No Free Yes No
    HootFeed No Free Yes Yes
    TweetWally No Free No No
    Visible Tweets No Free No No
    Tweet Chat No Free No No

    So after all these experimenting, we have decided to go with TweetFall using its first layout design.

  • Make Your OWN Word Cloud Image

    Make Your OWN Word Cloud Image

    When making presentations or developing websites, I feel it is very time consuming to find images under Creative Commons Licensed or from Public Domain. After spending hours of searching on Google with “Labeled for reuse”, pixabay and openclipart, I think I may contribute a little on creating your own Word Cloud Images.

    The most frequently used website is wordle.net. I used it to create the School Data Analysis image below for one of my presentations. It is now shared to the public gallery so everyone can use it:

    School Data Analysis
    School Data Analysis

    Wordle is easy and it is the very first app of its kind. However, when I tried to create a “Thank You” word cloud in different languages, the problems came:

    Problem 1: Wordle doesn’t work well across different language. I used this page as the resources and typed in 25 types of “thank you” in different languages.

    Unfortunately, Wordle wasn’t able to recognize all of them. Many of them showed up as blank squared blocks. I tried to set the font as “Chrysanthi Unicode” as instructed in this article, it didn’t work.  Tried all other fonts, none of them worked for all languages.

    Problem 2:

    I wanted more than just a random piled words/phases in a meaningless shape. I wanted something more meaningful, something like this, but with the words of “Thank You” instead:

    Picture retrieved at http://funzim.com/10-cool-facts-love/
    Picture retrieved at http://funzim.com/10-cool-facts-love/

    Wordle doesn’t do this, at least for now.

    So I googled and found this site:

    http://www.tagxedo.com/app.html

    I would say I am very satisfied with the outcome:

    1. It was able to recognize all types of languages

    2. It gives plenty of cool shapes to frame your words in.

    So the final products I had are these:

    Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike License @ Tagxedo
    Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike License @ Tagxedo
    Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike License
    Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike License
    Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike License
    Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike License
    Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike License
    Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike License
    Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike License
    Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike License

     

     

     

     

    There are more variations in Tagxedo. Try it yourself and you can create so many interesting word clouds with CC license for your own non-commercial presentation use.