Haiku Deck – Free Presentation App for iPad

haiku deck

I’m prepping for an “iPad in the Classroom” workshop and I thought I’d try Haiku Deck – a free presentation app for the iPad. It’s an impressive and easy to use tool for creating a knock-out presentation on the iPad – a great way for teachers and students to quickly share their ideas with the classroom and the digital world beyond. Here’s a deck I created in a few minutes. I used the same image but typically you’d have different images for every slide.

haiku select image

Haiku Deck relies on strong visual content and minimal use of text. Think Edward Tufte meets Pecha Kucha. Creating a slide is simple. Add some text – there’s not much room, so keep it brief. You can insert your own image from a variety of sources – take a photo with the iPad or grab an image from your iPad camera roll, Instagram, Google Drive or DropBox. Haiku Deck takes the words you’ve used on the slide and runs a fast search for Creative Commons images. It even adds the sources in the small font at the base of your finished slide. If you don’t like the search from the words you’ve used in your slide, you can type in your own search term.

When you’re done you have a variety of ways to share. You can project from your iPad or push out to the big screen via Apple TV. You can post to a variety of social media – like Facebook or Twitter. Email it as a PPT or Keynote. Embed it on your blog. Or just keep it private.

If you want to reorder a slide, press and hold down on a slide in the sorter view at the bottom of the screen. It will enlarge and you can drag it to another point in the deck. (Be warned that the app does not run on an iPad 1.)

I can’t promise that the Creative Commons search feature will play nice with your school web filter (actually I hope you don’t have filters). But I did harness my inner 8th grader to search on a variety of “naughty words.” You’ll see my test below turned up a variety of innocuous images and even mocked me with a “aww you are making me blush.” 

haiku search

2 Replies to “Haiku Deck – Free Presentation App for iPad”

  1. Hi Peter,
    Thanks so much for being a part of our creative community, and for writing about Haiku Deck! I hope you had a chance to try out the new version of our app — it has the same great features that you mentioned as well as a some awesome new additions like creating charts, graphs, and lists. You can read about these new features on our blog (includes download link): http://blog.haikudeck.com/announcing-haiku-deck-2-0/
    Great job on your deck, keep them coming!
    Lisa from Team Haiku Deck

    1. Thanks for the comment Lisa,

      I just finished up two days of workshops at a K-12 school that’s implementing 1-to-1 iPad at middle school level. I taught them how to use both Haiku Deck and iBooks Author. Two great apps for students and teachers to share their thinking. (at two very different points on the learning curve.)

      They loved the simplicity of Haiku Deck and its strong visual punch. A perfect starting point for student to hone their writing skills and craft a message with visual appeal. Most importantly, Haiku Deck transforms the iPad from content consumption to creation.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.