I need some help. I've been assigned the task of making a powerpoint about communism to present to the rest of the peeps in my global history class. The problem is that they are a bunch of freshman and will have no idea what big words like "the proletariat" mean. Does anyone have any tips to get me going?

Answer
Communism as a theory goes back long before Karl Marx, and has been practised in a variety of ways. Marx's version, as modified by Lenin and Stalin, gave it a very bad rep.
The theory is that all production (manufacturing, farming, sales, etc) should be in the hands of the government for the benefit of the workers, as opposed to capitalism, in which producers are private, and any "surplus value" (profit) can be kept by the owners of the means of production.
It might be worth devoting a couple minutes to showing a few of the terms of jargon, explaining what they mean (proletariat=a fancy word for workers), and toss in a few comments about how the more fancy the language the more likely someone is trying to fool you. Forex, proletariat is supposed to make workers feel they are part of a movement, not just a worker.