Screencast

Hello everyone, were taking a different approach to today’s blog. I was supposed to upload a screen cast directly too the blog but there was security issues so I posted in on you tube for you all to view there. The screen cast gives a brief overview of two different pieces of software I used during the subject ‘IT Professional Skills’. These two software’s are Microsoft teams and Microsoft sway. IF anyone reading is unfamiliar with this software ill explain their purposes.

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is cloud-based team collaboration software that is part of the Office 365 suite of applications. The core capabilities in Microsoft Teams include business messaging, calling, video meetings and file sharing. It would be most frequently used in business’s however it is also very useful for group projects for students. As a team we all agreed it was excellent. Rather than communicate over whatsapp, Facebook, snapchat or any other social platform we were more than happy to contact each other through teams. Over the duration of our project we got a lot of use out of it. We messaged each other, shared important links, had several video calls,kept each other up to date on our own progress relating to the presentation and posted useful information we came across that could benefit each other in the presentation. I personally found the mindmeister which can be accessed by logging into office365 was really beneficial. Creating the mind map really helped present the information I wanted to talk about in a very clean, neat and satisfying layout.

Microsoft Sway

We were expected to experiment with different presentation applications rather than the cliche microsoft powerpoint. We had several to choose from but we were torn between prezi or sway. However after screwing around with prezi we decided the overall better application was Sway. Generally sway was an easier app to handle benefiting making enjoyable presentations. Actually every group in our class went with Sway.

Straight away you’re presented with multiple choices of themes to choose from.

As you can see its main attribute is it’s simplicity. There is a multitude of different cards to choose from, such as text, video, grid, or heading, and each one is tailored to a specific kind of information. But unlike PowerPoint slides, the cards work together seamlessly as you scroll through the finished Sway. This means that they’re read as part of a narrative, not individual elements.

You can choose whether your Sway scrolls horizontally or vertically, the color theme, the background, and a few other things as well. Of course, it can be difficult to know if what you’ve chosen will look good to others, and there are plenty of options to choose from, so Sway gives you a Remix button which will apply a random design to your Sway which the team and myself found really helpful to keep slides different. You can click Remix as many times as you want, and it will be quite a while before it starts repeating designs.

I would recommend both of these pieces of software to students or employees who have a group project that requires a presentation as both go hand in hand, very useful and easy to use. Hope you guys found this helpful , See you in the next one.