An Academic Screen Saver

We came across this great idea at a recent workshop conducted by Kathleen Ferenz, from Apple. Some of the best ideas are in hindsight the most obvious and this is a good example.

Within Systems Preferences on the MacBooks students can create Screen Savers from any collection of images. Usually these are photographs, but what if these were images from a particular class or lists of a visual vocabulary list? I quickly made a Geography screen saver by doing the following.

1. From within either Keynote or PowerPoint, I can save the presentation as a collection of pictures, using either the export or save functions. This creates a folder of images, one for each slide. This folder can be saved in your pictures folder.
2. Then I went into Systems Preferences and clicked in the + button at the bottom to add a folder of pictures. Here I navigated the folder I had created in Step 1.
3. Then you can change the settings on how the pictures are arranged.
4. Done :)

Applications:

1. Classes could make the slides in Keynote and share collectively through a Picasa Gallery, or sharing functions in iPhoto.
2. Students could easily create different folders of screen saver images for classes, 
3. Teachers could use this as a starter when students are entering your room up on your projector.