Thursday, January 6, 2011

Lion Den Slide Collection

As you think about getting started in a new semester, you may find that sets of FREE animated slides might help you spice up your classroom presentations.

For the last several years, I sent a set of hundreds of slides from my Lion Den site for students to anyone who donated to keeping that site up and running.  But starting in this new year of a new decade of a (relatively new) century, I'm now opening up the "secret vault" for anyone who wants them.  And promises to use them for good and not evil.

If you go to the Lion Den downloads page and join the Lion Den, you'll get acccess to all the slide files.

Once you are in the download location, you can access the original set of slides in the folder marked  Lion Den Slide Collection Version 1.0. Newer and updated slide collections will be available in the folder Lion Den Slide Collection Version 2.0.  You can follow the links to the folders to see what's there, but you cannot download any of the slide sets until you fill out the form and get the super-secret password.

You can preview some of the slides by going to the Lion Den slide page.  However, not all the slides in the Lion Den Slide Collection are posted on that website, the slides are posted individually (not in sets), and they are in "slide show" format (which may not be fully editable by you).  The slide sets in the downloadable collection are in fully editable .ppt or .pptx format.  It's much easier to go to the Lion Den download page, join the highly-classified-super-secret membership roster and download the sets of slides.

All the slides can be freely used (and adapted) for noncommercial educational purposes (see the license embedded in the Notes section of each slide).

As the User Manual states, these slides are not necessarily as detailed (or as simplified) as you would like to use in your own presentation.  But because they are editable, you can change that, right?  Also, some of these slides were originally intended for a particular purpose (such as introducing a topic that will be explored more fully later).

Another thing to remember is that the slide sets are not meant to be a complete set of slides covering all topics of A&P.  In my classroom, I use a lot of images from the textbook (provided by the publisher).  The slides in the Lion Den Slide Collection are meant to be supplemental slides.

Keep in mind that the slide sets are NOT created by a professional graphic artist . . . just old Kevin hacking away in PowerPoint.  So they may not be as slick as some slides you've seen.

All the slides are in PowerPoint-compatible files.  The newer slides are in the newer XML PowerPoint format (.pptx).