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Goochland’s Innovation Team

Archives for February 2020

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Masters and Custom Themes in Keynote

We all know Keynote comes with a nice collection of themes—different styles of slides to use to create your presentations. But sometimes they don’t meet your needs. You may want a different slide layout, a different slide size, or you want to only use Keynote to create something other than a presentation.

Customizing a slideware theme makes sense once you finally realize that slides can be more than just titles and bulleted lists!

In this post, we explore editing slide masters and creating your own custom themes.

Editing Slide Masters

Slides in Keynote can hold different elements. By editing a master slide, you can change things like:

  • background color,
  • individual elements on screen (graphics, text boxes, media placeholders,
  • font and text style,
  • dynamic information like date and time or slide number.

In the video linked below, I reduce the number of slide masters that belong to a theme so that Keynote can be used for a specific purpose, with students in mind. You can also edit the master slides to include things that maybe Apple didn’t think of. Examples might include a slide with four image placeholders instead of three, a different set of fonts, or your own custom shape styles and color scheme.

Screenshot and video button for my video on using Keynote

To edit the slide master within a theme, first open a new document, add at least one slide to your presentation, and under Format, with nothing selected, choose Edit Slide Master. A blue bar appears below the slide to indicate you are editing the master slide. If you edit the Master in a slide deck you’ve already worked on, please be informed that changing the master will change every instance of that slide in your deck.

Making Your Own Theme

Once you start editing, you might as well admit defeat. You’ve started to create your own Keynote theme! Beyond editing the masters in one of Apple’s simpler slide styles, you can do some additional things to make the slides more usable for you or your own audience.

  • You can name the masters in the sidebar that appears once you edit any master slide,
  • You can remove master slides you do not want to include,
  • You can duplicate master slides to make variations of a particular type, such as background color,
  • You can use media placeholders if you want students to include media assets such as video or pictures.

Once you have edited all the masters to your liking, you can go to File > Save Theme… and either save it as:

  • a standalone Keynote file in .KTH format (use this to share your theme with students via an LMS or AirDrop),
  • your own theme on your device.

Fonts, Styles, and Colors

The one caveat with creating your own themes in Keynote is that the theme won’t work as intended on another machine unless the fonts used are available on different devices. By sticking with the supplied fonts on MacOS and iOS by Apple, you should be in good shape!

If you really want to go all the way and share a very polished theme, then go the extra mile to…

  • Customize the color collection that belongs to your theme (this is used in the new color picker and across charts,
  • Create styles for text and for symbols
  • You can also include a slide master that just has clip art on it—for instance, you can use your school’s logo or something unique to your classroom on one of the slides so that students can re-use those images across different slides.

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The Slides Aren’t the Presentation*

  • Yet everyone always refers to the PowerPoint or Keynote or Google Slides files as “the presentation.”

Several years ago, when I presented at NECC (the former name of the ISTE Conference), I wanted to produce a really compelling handout for my talk. I created a template in Adobe InDesign and then also used the same graphical language in my slides. I can’t be sure of the result, but my idea was to use simple, clean slides, and put all the details into the PDF document I shared online.

John's first SlideDoc from 2009

This document allowed me to write things out instead of having to use busy, text-crowded slides. But the software I used is expensive and probably is overkill for the job.

When I read Resonate by Nancy Duarte, I was curious about her idea for something she called SlideDocs. And having made a hundred or more slide decks in my professional life, I knew that clean slides that didn’t compete for the audience’s attention were best. I wanted to re-explore this idea, of producing a secondary document that worked better as the accompanying medium for a presentation.

As I read Nancy’s website, and downloaded and played with her SlideDoc templates, I wasn’t necessarily happy with using Keynote (or PowerPoint) as a tool for laying out text. So I switched things up and created my own Pages template.

Accessible below, I have created a video on how to create your own template within Pages and have also linked to the file I used. Please note that the fonts I used are not standard, so you can replace Eras and Adobe Jenson with those that you like.

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Taking Graphics to the Next Level with Keynote

Google images. Copy. Paste. So many of us (and our students!) use this method to acquire images and graphics for presentations, documents, and other visual aids. It’s a quick and easy way to enhance a presentation. I mean, who actually has time to create their own graphics and what program would you even use? 

But here’s the thing—students are potentially learning bad habits when they search for Google images and do that copy and paste. It’s so easy, right? Except there’s text that appears in those searches. Many of the images that appear could be protected by copyright. Can you find the copyright message, below?

 

One solution may be to ask students to create their own photographs. But sometimes it isn’t a photograph that they’re looking for. They need a graphic—something we might categorize as clip art. Fortunately, all students and teachers have access to Keynote, a program on both laptops and on iPads, where they can easily create their own graphics to level-up presentation designs and personalize their work.

 

Where do I begin?

You may want to think about Keynote as a version of Photoshop, the industry standard for making graphics and editing photos. Keynote isn’t Photoshop, but like Photoshop, you can create graphics that can later be exported as JPEG, PNG, or PDF files. The difference is all your graphics will be the same size and shape as slides, right? Wrong! If you’re thinking of exporting something that will become the whole canvas of your slide, you’ll want to first change the size of the slide in Keynote so that it matches your final requirements. Clicking or tapping on “Document” in the upper, right-hand corner within Keynote will offer you the “Slide Size” drop-down menu to pick a size or create your own.

In this example, John used a custom square shape to prepare graphics for marketing our upcoming job fair.

 

Each of the elements in this “slide” are separate objects. Text boxes that are rotated form the backdrop and bottom third of the square. A rotated square forms the diamond for Niche.com. A PDF graphic is inserted for the Goochland logo, and we can cut our models by using the Instant Alpha tool—made easy when you photograph someone against a plain, white background.

Click the video below (10 minutes) to see three features together: Instant Alpha, masking, and slide exports to graphics like JPEGs. 

 

Moving Beyond Rectangles and Squares

The shapes library in Keynote not only offers a multitude of attractive icons, but also the ability to combine, separate, and edit those shapes to save to your own shapes library for easy access. You can even draw your own clipart to use in animations (check out our post on Keynote animations here!) 

See for yourself how easy graphic design can be by clicking on the video below (11.5 minutes) for some tips.

 

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Keynote: Clean & Clear

In this post, as part of our series on Keynote, we address tips on the appearance of slides to promote clarity in communication to your audience. While most of our posts have focused on how and why to use this tool with students, this post is geared more for folks who might be presenting to an audience. It’s appropriate for students giving presentations, but also the adults in the audience, as well!

The tips contained in the embedded YouTube video below include:

  • Chunking Your Talk into Sections (Think chapters, acts, etc.)
  • Providing a Table of Contents and a similar Review Slide
  • Using Animation to Build Content onto Slides
  • Choosing and Sticking to a Color Palette
  • Additional Tips

If you’d like to play with my presentation and see how everything works within Keynote, you can download it here. Please do not repost or publish these slides elsewhere—thanks.

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Reflecting on Security – Protocols for Data Security

Today many people know someone close to them who have become victims of crimes associated with data theft: it can be phishing, stolen identity, credit card fraud, or an account has been hacked, say, to a social media account. In this post, we review some security protocols. Some of these may be specific to Macintosh and iOS devices, the use of Google Suite, and more generalized considerations for personal privacy. I’ve organized these around different themes.

Passwords and PINs

This may surprise some, but it is highly inadvisable to use the same passwords or PIN codes through different services. Passcodes in today’s technology environments are very weak ways to protect your data. Therefore, we recommend (1) using different passwords across different services, (2) changing passwords periodically, (3) using two-factor authentication services, and (4) using password manager tools to remember passwords on secure devices. Let’s unpack some of that!

Using Different Passwords and PIN Codes

Let’s say that one of the online services you use has a data breach. These are happening all the time. Data breaches can reveal personal information, such as a social security number, but they can also reveal passwords. Sometimes these passwords are not attached to accounts, but many times they are. So if the password you’ve used, say, with yahoo.com is attached to your name, someone can try using that same password on other services where you may have an account, i.e., google.com. By using different passwords across different services and devices, one breach doesn’t cascade to your entire online persona.

Changing Passwords

Because of the common news around security breaches, it is a good idea to change your password from time to time. At a minimum, we’d recommend four times per year. But what makes up a good password?

When people hack accounts, they typically aren’t sitting at the screen trying to guess your password. Instead, they write programs that can use the work of the computer to keep trying and trying a long list of passwords. Words that appear in the dictionary and common names do not make good passwords. Short passwords are also poor. Most online services now require at least 8 characters and many can go up to 32. While passwords with combinations of letters, numbers, and symbols may sound impossible to remember, there are ways to automate logins (read below). But it is in your best interest to choose passwords with complexity to reduce the impact of dictionary-style attacks on your accounts.

Two-Factor Authentication

Two-factor authentication is a way to login to some online services that require two steps. The first is typical, such as typing in a username and a password. The second is part is a key exchange between the service and you, using a trusted online medium. The most commonly used today is a SMS text message to your cell phone. After receiving the code, you have a limited amount of time to complete the second step of login. And it means always having your phone with you.

While two-factor authentication by cell phone is a common mechanism for enhanced security, it is also rife with problems. Please note that an SMS method is better than no second method at all, however for better security, consider another two-factor method.

Keyed media is another method for logins. For instance, Google sells a Titan Key for authenticating to Google. This physical key must be inserted into a device to authenticate. If you use Google Single Sign On (SSO) for many services, think how many would be protected by use of a physical key. This is not a tool we recommend using, however it is a good option for someone with system administrator responsibilities. However, we mention it here because it currently one of the more robust ways to keep your Google Account secure, and it may evolve to become more commonplace in the future.

Better than using SMS text messaging is to use a trusted app for managing two-factor authentication. We recommend the use of Google Authenticator on your phone on iPad. It works very similarly to a SMS text message, except instead of going to your text messages app, the code is sent to the app by Google.

For your Google account, you can make these account settings in the security area. To use the Authenticator app, download it first to an Android or iPhone then go through the setup on your Google account. You will scan a QR code then type in the code to set things up. You can even use Authenticator with other, third-party services.

Why are SMS text messages less than ideal for two-factor authentication? Phone numbers are tied to the SIM card on your phone. When connected to your cellular network (AT&T, Verizon, etc.) that SIM card’s number and your carrier make the connection so that calls and texts get routed to your actual phone. You can easily change your phone number if you have a second SIM card that has been activated (some people do this for various reasons).

So what happens when someone spoofs your number by plugging in a SIM card with your number? They can get the texts and phone calls made to your phone. While doing this isn’t simple, there have been cases where celebrities have had their private information stolen by paying off cellular employees that grant the information that gets written onto another phone. If I know your Gmail account and have spoofed your phone? Two-factor authentication won’t help. While the use of apps for authentication isn’t nearly as widespread as using SMS numbers (as an example, Apple still only uses text messages for two-factor authentication), it probably will be in the future.

Which is to underline another fact: always have your phone with you if you count on using it for two-factor authentication. And use the best protection your phone offers for unlocking your phone (i.e., longer PIN codes or FaceID or TouchID).

Password Management

So, if you have accounts across, let’s say, 100 services, and you’re using, let’s say, 100 different passwords, how can you possibly remember them, if you don’t have a photographic memory?

Password managers can keep track of all those passwords! There is now password management built into Chrome, Safari, and through the use of third-party managers. The Chrome and Safari options are free.

The best option, in our opinion, is a third-party manager. I use 1Password by Agile Software on my personal Mac and my personal iPhone. The data file containing all my passwords is stored on Dropbox as an encrypted file. Only 1Password can open this file.

That way, when I add a new password to this collection, it is accessible across any device with 1Password installed, such as my Mac and iPhone. It even has random password generation support, so you don’t have to think-up a randomized password. On the phone, I use FaceID to open the app, keeping everything secure.

You can also use your browser’s ability to remember passwords. When it detects you choosing a password, more often than not, it will present a pop-up dialog asking you if you want Chrome or Safari to remember your password. This information is stored on your device in an encrypted file.

In Chrome, these passwords can be shared across devices if you use a Chrome Profile. In Safari, you can enable iCloud sharing of your keychain.

One thing to be cautious of is using these built-in password management solutions on an insecure device. If I am using Chrome password management, for instance, let’s say I leave my laptop open and unlocked on a table. Anyone can walk up to that device, for instance, and take a look within Chrome settings at my saved passwords. Likewise, if my Google account is compromised, anyone with my password could access the Chrome profile information (assuming I didn’t use two-factor authentication).

It would also not be advisable to use this solution on a personal device you share with others. Not only can your password be seen, but it can also be changed, thus locking you out of your own account.

Finally, it speaks to the quality of the password or mechanism you use to open your physical device (laptop, cell phone). For instance, if I choose an easy-to-guess PIN on my iPhone, once someone is inside, they’ll have access to the keychain.

The third party management app I use, for instance, has its own master password and it does not enable auto-login unless you enable that feature for convenience.

Encryption

The most secure way to protect data is through encryption. For instance, on an iPhone, once the device is off, if someone were to remove the memory chip inside with all of your data, they’d find it is scrambled. iOS devices are encrypted by default. Without going into the weeds of how it works, think of encryption as a mechanism for scrambling the contents of your data with a key that can unscramble the data later. Imagine un-doing your smoothie into whole chunks of pineapple, yogurt, and banana? Encryption on the Mac can be generally enabled in three ways for free.

Filevault

FileVault is Apple’s whole-disk encryption standard. Once set, it encrypts the entire hard disk or SSD inside your computer. This means if your computer’s disk is removed, it cannot be read.

FileVault is convenient. Everytime you unlock your laptop with your password, FileVault is decrypting your hard drive’s contents. And everything stored in your home folder is protected. FileVault is enabled through the security pane of your Mac. You should not turn on FileVault unless you understand the implications of locking yourself out of your entire computer. You can now use your AppleID as a backdoor should you forget your Mac’s admin password. We do not recommend FileVault if you’re not an expert user. Consider one of the options below, instead.

This guide outlines how to enable FileVault on MacOS. We recommend you do this with the help of technology staff if you think you’re a good candidate, using one of our laptops.

Secure Disk Image

This is similar to creating a big secure folder on your Mac. A disk image is a single file that is treated by the MacOS as a “disk.” Once created, and set up with encryption, it can be “mounted” or “dismounted” like an external hard disk. Any files you copy into this disk are encrypted when your virtual disk is unmounted. Each time you want to mount the disk in the Finder, it will ask you for your encryption password. See a tutorial here on using Disk Utility to create an secure disk image.

Single Encrypted Files

This method encrypts a single file on your Mac. It requires the use of the Command-Line Interface in the Terminal app. You tell the Mac to create the encrypted file and pass to it the password. After that, opening the file each time will require for you to enter that file-specific password. If the file is moved to another Macintosh, the user must know the encryption password for that file. This guide covers the Terminal commands for creating zip files, which can be encrypted in the MacOS Terminal application.

Encryption in Google Drive

Since so many of us today use Google Drive’s storage and the tools attached to Google Drive (Sites, Sheets, and Docs), you may also want to encrypt data stored in Drive. We provide a third-party solution to encrypt both files and folders called SysCloud. Every user with access to your file must know the encryption password. It’s easily enabled by right-clicking on a file in drive and opening with… SysCloud Encryption for Google Drive.

Google Drive image showing SysCloud

Then, you’ll be asked to choose an encryption password. This should not be your Google password.

SysCloud dialog box

While the Google Drive environment is very secure, it’s only as secure as you’ve made your Google Account. However, anyone with access to your Google Drive will find they cannot access an encrypted file without the added resource of your encryption password. Any data stored in Google Drive that contains personal identifiable information regarding students and employees should be encrypted.

At VSTE 2019 this past year, we learned from Google that your data stored in the Google Cloud (i.e. Drive) is stored in their data warehouses in a very interesting way. If someone were to penetrate a Google server farm and steal a hard drive, for instance, they would never see your documents. Instead, Google’s system slices your Google Docs at the word level across their server infrastructure around the world. One word in your Google doc could be stored on a machine in California, and the next word is sitting on a server in Ireland. It only gets put back together in your account, once you’ve authenticated. 🤓