I have been spending the last few days trying to write up a basic introduction to South Asia for my students. In general I try to make my own charts and graphs, but I really wanted to add this cool map from Himal magazine.

I was asked how I made this image transparent. Actually, it is very simple. I opened the map in Photoshop (if you don't have PhotoShop, I am sure you can use a free on-line photo editor like Paint.net). Double clicking on the image layer opens it up for editing. I used the wand tool to highlight the Indian Ocean and delete it as well as all of the detail from Iran and other non-South Asian countries. Once I was happy with the editing, I saved the document as a GIF file.

That's it. Then I opened the image as a picture in PowerPoint and voila. In PowerPoint 2007, there is simple dropshadow feature which only takes one extra click. So I added that for polish. That's really all it takes to make slides look slightly more professional.

The first draft PowerPoint slideshow lecture is enclosed below:

Labels: graphics, india, powerpoint, south asia, teaching, technology