Course 3 Final Project – A Presentation with Soul

Course 3 gave me the opportunity to reflect on the importance of visual literacy. From infographics to digital stories and presentations, digital media makes visual literacy skills to be more and more in demand. For my final project, I decided to work on a presentation that I needed for my G6 English-Humanities class. The purpose of this presentation was for students to review the basics of copyright and the Creative Commons. Since the presentation was going to be used by other teachers in my team who have just started to explore these topics, I had to make sure that it was appropriate for them to present on their own.

In order to create an informative and engaging presentation, these are the aspects I considered.

Story: I wanted the students to see a progression of ideas that end up in something very concrete, which were the sites with CC0 licensed materials. For this reason, I decided to first, start with what copyright is, then move to some of its challenges, to finally present the Creative Commons as a solution to those challenges.

Colour and Balance: the Creative Commons branding (logo, licenses, buttons, etc.) is all black and white. I wanted to keep in line with that, so I decided to balance the presentation between full-size image slides and slides with a white background. I wanted the presentation to be very clean-looking, as the Creative Common branding is.

Purposeful imagery: While keeping the presentation uncluttered, I still wanted to have some images to help convey my message. I perused various CC0 image repository sites and found what I wanted. For example, for the title slide, I chose an image of a photographer pointing a camera, ready to take a photo. I liked this image because it represented the birth of a piece of creative work – the photograph. Next to the lens, I decided to include the copyright symbol in the exact same size as the lens of the camera. The image and the symbol together capture the heart of the presentation. Another example is the slide that explains what the Public Domain is. Here, I chose an image of a hand opened, positioned in a manner that symbolizes giving out something, in the same way an author of a creative work gives all the rights over it when he or she gives the work to the Public Domain.

Without further ado, here is the final version of the presentation. Please note that some slides look different from the original file as I experienced a problem when I uploaded the file to Google Slides that I can’t fix at the moment. You can see a PDF version of the presentation here.

Featured image on Kaboompics