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  • Writer's pictureRachel Smith

Keynote's fabulous updates

I am a lover of Keynote, it's so much more than a presentation tool (although it does that well too.) Keynote can hep your students to make animations, infographics, quizzes and stories to name but a few. With Keynote you can really let you imagination fly. Keynote has recently been updated, it has a library of flat icons that you can choose from and you can also draw in Keynote but for me, as a languages teacher the most exciting update came earlier this week when Apple announced that they had integrated a recording tool into Keynote and not just Keynote but Pages and Numbers too but we'll save those for another blog post.


The ability to be able to record directly onto a Keynote slide is a real boon to language teachers. Earlier this year Apple announced that you could screen record on you iPad and many of us were using this as a work around for recording in Keynote, indeed my students made some great movies by doing just that. Having said that it was a little fiddly and the there was a bit of editing required to get your movie looking just right with this most recent update there is no need to edit as your finished article can be exported as a movie, no editing required.


Not only do you not need to edit but creating using the new tools in Keynote is super simple too. Here are some of the things that I like to use.


Adding shapes - there are lots of flat icons to choose from. It's easy to change their colour fill too.


Adding images to shapes. You can now fill your shape with an image, which could work well for description activities. In my example below you will see that I have filled my sofa with a photo of my family.


Breaking apart images - you can break apart the flat icons into the component shapes. I did this in my example below in which I filled my TV screen with a photo of myself. I then regrouped my shapes so that I could resize my image.


The arrange menu for breaking apart images.


Drawing. It's super simple to add a drawing into Keynote simply tap the plus button and then the add media image (icon of far right of the menu) and tap drawing.

Image settings menu on iPad

The drawing menu will appear you can select various drawing tools, if you hold your finger on the drawing tools you can select the thickness of the line and the opacity of the colour.


Drawing tools menu on iPad

The tube tool is the fill tool, draw your shape, select the fill tool and tap the area that you wish to fill.


The fill tool

The dotted line tool allows you to select the shape that you have drawn and resize, duplicate or copy it. Not only is this a great feature but you can copy your hand drawn item and paste it not only on another slide but into a Pages or Numbers document too!


The select and resize tool

Adding audio

In the media menu you will see that you can now add audio. Select record audio, press the microphone that appears at the bottom of your slide and away you go. One you are done you can preview your recording and even trim it if required. The recording is then added to your slide in a little audio 'bubble' which you can place anywhere on your image.


Audio 'Bubbles'

Once you have completed your masterpiece exporting it could not be easier, simply tap the three dots on the right of your slide and select export. You can choose to export your deck as a PDF, Powerpoint, Movie or simply as images.



Keynote has always been a flexible tool but with the advent of audio recording it has just become even more amazing. Why not try using it as a listening exercise? Create some 'audio bubbles' in Keynote placing one bubble in a separate blank slide. Share the Keynote deck with your students and ask them to listen to the audio recording. Rather than simply writing an answer to a question, get them to draw the answer or create images using the flat icons. I have used this in class before but I had to use the Ferrite Recording Studios app in order to be able to do it. Now creating this kind of exercise has just got a whole lot easier.

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