Making PowerPoint Books

Here's a relatively easy way to make books in PowerPoint. You might want to make books because one or more of your students has a specific interest not met by your classroom or school library, has a disability and paper copies are inaccessible, you enjoy making books. You might want to teach your kids how to make them for each other. I've tried to lay out steps below. This is how I do it on a Mac. Some things will look slightly different on a PC but the process is the same.

1. Open PowerPoint. Go to Format > Slide Layout and Choose Title.



2. Move the Title box to the bottom of the slide (unless you like your text at the top). Copy and paste this slide repeatedly so that you have more slides than you think you'll use. It's faster and easier to delete unwanted slides when you're done than to create additional.



3. Gather your images for the pages from Flickr's creative common area. These are public domain photos that are searchable. You can write your text first and then search for images second, but it is faster to get your pictures and then write text to fit.



4. Click on the All Sizes button above the picture, choose the small or medium size for digital books. Small usually looks fine--you can view in PowerPoint and decide for yourself.



5. On a Mac you can click and drag the picture directly onto a PowerPoint slide, move it where you want, and resize. Then your can drag the URL to the notes window below the slide. On a PC, download the image (use the Insert Picture > From File to put on slide), and copy and paste the URL.



6. Save regularly. Computers, especially lab computers, are fickle. You don't want to have to repeat your work.

7. In slide sorter view, you can rearrange your images/slides to suit your needs.

8. When you are done, you can transfer the URL's from the notes under each slide to a final "credits" page.

If you have additional questions, let me know, and I'll do my best to clarify these instructions further.