I have been in love with Keynote since Steve Jobs first announced it back in 2003 at Macworld EXPO. During my time at The Warren School, Keynote was THE application that I could use with any aged student and any ability teacher. This application just makes sense. Unless of course you tell 7-year-old kids, “We’re going to make a slide show” and they respond, “What’s a slide?”
One of the exercises that I did with the first and second grade was to have them take three pictures of themselves in Photo Booth being happy, sad, and silly. Then I’d have them create the Keynote presentations where each slide had their picture and the word that described their emotion.
Bing, bang, boom—they would pick things up within 20 minutes. This 20 minutes of playing was usually enough to get them using the software without any assistance from me. Getting them to stop using PhotoBooth is a completely different story!
Keynote is also a great app to get less brave adults using presentation software. There’s just something about the interface that everyone just understands. And it’s a great way to get people to learn about the Inspector palette that Apple uses in all of their iWork software.
If you don’t yet own iWork and want to purchase Keynote for the Mac, $19.99, click here.
(opens the Mac App Store)
To purchase Keynote for iOS, $9.99, click here. (opens the iTunes Store)