Every iPad we gave to the students has the ability to run a touch optimised version of Apples presentation software Keynote. Despite this, every student immediately defaulted back to using PowerPoint for presenting.

After discussing this with the students, the following issues came to light

• The students were so nervous about presenting that adding another layer (of unknown software) immediately steered them towards using the familiar powerpoint bullet approach
• Keynote for iPad has a slight learning curve – unlike most apps which can be used straight away it’s worth reminding the users to RTFM (which additionally shows off the power of the software)

Spend some time actually describing the process of how to construct presentations on the iPad as the workflow can be a bit different – this can be combined with a discussion of what makes a good presentation different to a poor one

The iPad presentation workflow will be described in another post, but the important pedagogical issue here is that we get the students to evaluate each others presentations (there are many good templates already available on the Internet so don’t start from scratch). In this instance each group had analysed a different retailer so we made sure that all the presentations were shared around.

Personally I like to walk around a bit when teaching, so I find connecting my iPad to a projector with the VGA cable a bit awkward – I think we need some sort of wireless connectivity here as it’s different to how we use the iPad in other circumstances. Despite there being many improvements in the latest version of PowerPoint, I still believe that it’s easier to create a better presentation in Keynote – although you can ‘death by bullet point’ people with either if you’re not careful.