SlideShare
SlideShare – what is it?
- Upload PowerPoint presentations so they are freely available online
- Easily embeddable in other services e.g. blogs
- Add an mp3 soundtrack / narration and sync it with the slides
- YouTube for PowerPoint
- Community features such as tags, comments, favourites, related SlideCasts etc.
SlideShare – an example
The effective use of blogs in economics education from a workshop, recorded after the event as a SlideCast – PowerPoint slides synced with audio.
- Initially presented to 25 people at the DEE conference in 2007
- Now viewed over over 2000 times, downloaded over 60 times, embedded in 6 other websites
- Adding an audio track makes a SlideShare much more useful, making it a SlideCast
SlideShare – possible uses
- Disseminating lecture material for revision purposes
- Discuss lecture material using the comments feature to aid understanding
- As a student assignment assessing virtual presentation skills
- Find other presentations on your topic – save reinventing the wheel
- Building up a body of resources over time on a particular topic
- Drawing together conference / seminar materials using a common tag or keyword
- STOP PRESS – SlideShare played an April Fool’s prank on their users, some people were not impressed by it, prompting some to look for alternatives (scroll down to the section on presentations)
Exercise
- Go to SlideShare at http://www.slideshare.net/
- Search for cfbloke and find this presentation
- Explore the SlideCast section and find one with an audio track
Blog
Create a new blog post and embed a SlideShare presentation in it
http://support.wordpress.com/slideshows/slideshare/
This can be particularly powerful when accompanied by an audio track.
