Creating a Rainforest Habitat

Directions: Power Point is a presentation graphics application program you use to organize and present information. Whether you are giving a sales pitch or promoting a product, a presentation graphics application can help make your presentation effective and professional. The first activity you will complete will deal with animated graphics. You will learn how to use transitions to animate objects on one slide.

PowerPoint Video Tutorials for Creating Your Habitat

To open Power Point, go to "start," then "Programs", then choose "Power Point" from your list. Choose "blank presentation" from your dialog box. You will then be given several templates to choose from. Choose the "blank page" by clicking on it, then click "OK." When the slide opens, you are ready to begin adding pictures to your page. You will develop an aquarium with an ocean background color, assign transition effects to your animated graphics, and set the background music to "Jaws." Before moving on, save your presentation.

Click on file, and then save as. Name this presentation habitat@yourname and be sure you navigate to your folder before clicking OK.

You will now place a background on your blank slide, follow the steps below:

• Chick on format on your standard toolbar
• Select background from your selection list
• Under the background fill picture box, click on the arrow by the blank line
• Choose fill effects from your selection list
• Click the preset radio button
• Click the down arrow of the preset color drop-down list
• Choose ocean from the list
• Select one of the shading styles
• Click OK to close the fill background dialog box
• Click apply (You are only making one slide but if you were doing a series of slides you could choose apply to all to put the same background on each slide without having to insert it every time you created a new blank page)

To find graphics related to the ocean environment, click on the following links. Right click on the image you want, and then save it to your student folder. Since we are going to use "Jaws" as our background music, a shark gif would give the page more character. Also, try to find underwater plants, bubbles, etc. to make your scene look realistic.

Free Animated Graphics

Animation Library

Animated Gif Finder

Links:

Animals of the Rainforest
Click on an animal and learn a short fact.
http://www.chenowith.k12.or.us/TECH/subject/science/rf_animals.html Biomes of the World
Amazing pictures of the most beautiful places of the world.
http://www.mbgnet.net/ Blue Planet
Plants, animals, climate of the rainforest... a great site.
http://www.blueplanetbiomes.org/rainforest.htm What are Rainforests and Who Lives There?
Zoom School
Layers of the Rainforest, its importance and the animals that live there.
http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/rainforest/animals/Rfbiomeanimals.shtml

If you can not find adequate graphics at the site above, to http://google.com and in the search text box, type in the type of graphic you want to find. Some example search words include animated fish graphics, animated underwater graphics, underwater mermaid graphics, etc.

Once you have collected some of your graphics, you will place them on your slide. To do this, you follow the above directions for inserting your background as a graphic. Try not to resize your image because it will cause the animation to become fuzzy. Move your images around on the page to get a good balance.

If some of your graphics have a white background and you want to make it transparent, see the troubleshooting section below.

Background sample

To give your page a more realistic look, you will add transitions to some of the images to have them move across, up or down on a page. Select a fish you have currently placed on your slide by clicking once on it. You want to place the fish graphic where you want it to end up, not where you want it to start. Suppose your fish is facing right, you should place the fish all the way to the right side of the slide. Locate the custom animation on the animation effects toolbar (it has a blue arrow key pointing left) and click on it to open the custom animation dialog box. If your animation effects toolbar is not visible, click on view, then chose animation effects to open the toolbar. You will first need to check the animated slide objects box that contains the fish graphic you choose. It should be surrounded by little white boxes. Once you have put a check in the box that contains that graphic, a whole list will open for you. Depending on which way your fish are facing will determine what directions you will have them go. For example, if my fish graphic were facing to the right, I want it to swim from the left to the right. Choose crawl from the first drop down menu and from the left. To see how your transition will look, click the preview button at the top right of your dialog box. Now choose fly and see how this transitions looks on your page. You can actually have the graphic move off the page by placing your graphic off the page.

Troubleshooting:

White background shows up on my fish graphics, what can I do?

• Open Fireworks (Start, then Programs, then click on Fireworks to open the program
• Choose file from your standard toolbar, then click open
• Navigate to your student folder in the look in box
• Click on the graphics that contains the white background to open it
• Choose file, then export
• Choose OK to speed redraw your image
• In the bottom left hand side of your screen, click the arrow by the dialog line that reads no transparency and choose index transparency from the selection list
• Click next
• Name your gif
• Navigate to your student folder
• Click save
• Now when you insert the gif on the file it should have a transparent background

You may run across some gifs this will not work on. You will just have to experiment with each graphic.