As a continuation of our HCE unit in PLP, we were recently tasked to write about something I mentioned in an earlier blog post

I Know You Are But What Am I?

If you haven’t picked up on it yet, there was some mention of a project called the “Things I Carry.” Essentially, the project is about the things that we carry with us on a day-to-day basis that help us be the people we are and support us in our everyday lives.
We were given some time to think about this and the different things we use physically and mentally to get us through our day. When our time was up, we were told to make a Keynote with ten things we carry with us on a daily basis.

That wasn’t all though. We were given different dates to present our keynotes with the class. There was another catch though. To give us the full experience of Keynote, we were also told to use a whole bundle of features that the app gives us access to.
Here’s the list of things we were to include in our Keynote…

That list doesn’t include the other rules of Keynote that we were to use such as how we couldn’t use more than three words on a slide.

I was fortunate enough to be the very first person to go and I had one weekend to work on my Keynote so I made sure that I jumped straight into this project so I would be ready.
I started off by making a list of things I carry with me which I would then include in my Keynote.
Once I had that done, I got onto Keynote, chose a layout I liked, and got to work. I don’t know why, but the first thing I did was add all my slides in and put in unique colours for each slide. Once I had that done, I gathered a large collection of pictures from the internet that were simple and clean which would be relevant for each of my slides. I edited most of them and used insta alpha to isolate the object I wanted to use.
Most of the things I had to do on the list were familiar terms to me from other apps and programs and I was able to figure everything out from experimenting with the app (except presenter notes.)
I put in all of my pictures onto the slides. I went for a very clean and simple approach to my slides and wanted everything to be visually and aesthetically pleasing. I know from past slideshows I’ve done that flashy slides aren’t really for me and are distracting to the audience which is why I went for the simple approach. I did all my animations, groupings, etc and finally came up with my end product.

There was one more thing I had to do though in preparation for my presentation. I’m not so good at winging things, so I made a little script of bullet points for my slides which would help guide my points smoothly from one slide to the next. Each of these bullet points were very basic so when I read them, I wouldn’t spend much time looking at them and I would be able to expand on each of these points naturally. Even after doing those bullet points, I think I spent too much time looking at them anyways during my presentation. Either way, I think that I did a good job when I spoke to the class and communicated my ideas and points effectively. I was really happy happy with how the keynote itself turned out as it looked almost exactly as how I envisioned it would be.

This project definitely was another nice introduction to this whole HCE unit as it really gets you thinking about yourself, your experiences, and memories among other things. It’s good to think about the things that you carry with yourself everyday as it gives all of us a new appreciation for the things that are presented to us in life. It really set the mood for getting me to think about my future and life. Overall, this was a really interesting project and I learned a lot from myself just from taking some time to think.