GitPitch ❤️ Festival of Learning 2018

Powerful new Markdown presentation syntax shortcuts.

Welcome to the latest post in the GitPitch Presentation of the Day series. This series highlights some of the great work developed within the GitPitch community.

You can find a link to earlier posts in this series along with related content on this blog here.

Drum Roll Please…

Without further ado let me introduce the latest GitPitch Presentation of the Day:

Tip! Click on the above presentation to focus, then press theF key to open the presentation for fullscreen viewing.

This presentation was created by Paul Hibbitts. You can reach Paul on Twitter and Github here and here respectively.

Paul is a man who wears many hats, being an educator, interaction designer and open source developer. Today’s presentation introduces Paul’s exciting open source project called Grav Course Hub.

hibbitts-design/grav-skeleton-course-hub_grav-skeleton-course-hub - Grav Course Hub with Git Sync, designed to support an open and collaborative environment for…_github.com

This presentation was prepared for the upcoming Festival of Learning 2018 conference. A conference celebrating teaching and learning in higher education. Without doubt, a conference well worth celebrating and supporting.

To learn more about this upcoming conference, click here.

Presentation Tips & Tricks!

This series of blog posts tries to highlight some of the great GitPitch features used by featured presentations.

Today I’m going to highlight the use of powerful new markdown shortcut syntax that can be used to enhance the look and feel of any presentation.

Tip #1. Step-by-Step Bullet List Shortcut Syntax

Presentation authors often need to introduce ideas to their audience one step at a time. This helps to keep the audience’s attention focused. While also revealing more complex ideas on simple idea at a time.

GitPitch now supports new @ol and @ul shortcut syntax tags for ordered and unordered lists respectively. These tags makes creating this type of step-by-step slide content very, very simple.

Here’s a markdown snippet from today’s featured presentation:

### @fa[laptop] What Skills are Required? @fa[laptop]

@ul[squares]

- Intended for “Tech-savvy” educators:

• Code editor usage (e.g. Atom or Brackets)
• Markdown or HTML basics
• Understanding folder hierarchies (i.e. relative links)
• Web server access
• GitHub working knowledge (recommended)

@ulend

By wrapping standard Markdown bullet-list syntax in these new tags, GitPitch converts your list items into fragments. These fragments are then revealed on your slides one-by-one, as shown here:

For a detailed demonstration of this feature see the following demo presentation. Click to launch here.

Tip #2. Text Color Shortcut Syntax

The chosen theme used by any GitPitch presentation determines the default font color for text rendered on any slide.

For example, today’s featured presentation uses the night theme and as such text on slides are rendered by default as white text.

But sometimes, presentation authors need a simple way to override defaults and apply custom colors on text. GitPitch now supports a new @color tag that lets you do just that.

Here’s a markdown snippet from today’s featured presentation:

### @color[black](Open Publishing Space)


Note, the slide title text is now rendered in black text. The resulting slide looks as follows:

Tip #3. Slide Background Color Syntax

We just talked about applying custom colors on text content. How about applying custom colors for the entire slide background instead?

Well, it couldn’t be easier. Here’s another markdown snippet from today’s featured presentation:

---?color=#8fa33b

### What About Other Open-related Grav Projects?

The resulting slide looks as follows:

Tip #4. Font Awesome Shortcut Syntax

The Font Awesome icon library is truly awesome. There are literally hundreds of beautifully rendered icons that can be used to add a little visual pizzazz 🚀 to any slide.

Here’s a markdown snippet from today’s featured presentation:

### @fa[rocket] Topics to Explore Today @fa[rocket]

1. What is Grav?2. Grav Open Course Hub Project3. Other Open-related Grav Projects4. Next Steps

The resulting slide looks as follows:

For a detailed introduction to using Font Awesome icons within GitPitch presentation slides see this earlier blog post.

Tip #5. Step-by-Step Image Sequence

Clearly there are many great features used by today’s featured presentation. But I want to highlight just one more feature that is used to great effect.

The introduction of a step-by-step image sequence.

Let’s quickly explore how this effect was created. First, the presentation author set a custom transition in their PITCHME.yaml:

transition : none

This setting prevents the sliding effect from occurring when moving between slides.

Next, the presentation makes great use of the powerful image-delimiter to render each image on successive slides:

---?image=assets/img/grav-open-course-workflow-1.png&size=contain&color=white

---?image=assets/img/grav-open-course-workflow-2.png&size=contain&color=white

---?image=assets/img/grav-open-course-workflow-3.png&size=contain&color=white

---?image=assets/img/grav-open-course-workflow-4.png&size=contain&color=white

The markdown snippet shown here simply injects a series of images onto a series of slides. The resulting effect within the slideshow presentation is shown here:

The Fastest Way from Idea to Presentation

I realize I have covered a lot of ground here today but there really is so much to like about today’s featured presentation.

I hope you were able to take some inspiration or helpful tips from today’s featured presentation. And thank you again Paul Hibbitts for sharing your fantastic talk.

I wish Paul and everyone involved at the upcoming Festival of Learning 2018 a hugely successful celebration of teaching and learning in higher education.

Before I wrap up, I do have a small favor to ask. If you enjoyed this post today, please show your appreciation by clapping 👏 for this article.

Your claps help boost the article on Medium. And that helps to get the word out about GitPitch, and all featured presentations and authors.

If you have any questions or feedback you can reach me in the comments sections below or directly on Twitter or by email, [email protected].

Don’t forget! Claim your GitPitch Pro one month free trial right here.

Thanks for reading today. Happy presenting everyone. David.

You can follow me right here on Medium or on Twitter for more news, tips and unique creations from the GitPitch community.