Chatting about presentations, Powerpoint, keynotes and bullet points.
With James Clay and David Sugden.
This is the sixty second e-Learning Stuff Podcast, This is Bullet Points
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Death by Powerpoint has almost become a running joke at conferences and in education. Despite that, presentations are a staple of many conferences, courses and learning programmes.
it’s very easy to upload and link to a Powerpoint presentation, but does mean that not only does a learner need to click a link and download a file, but also (usually) needs Powerpoint on their computer. If they don’t then we might send them off to download OpenOffice another step and hurdle.
One service I am using much more now for my presentations is Slideshare. It allows you to upload a presentation and converts it into a Flash slideshow. This can either be viewed on the Slideshare website or can be embedded into a webpage. This means you can embed it into the VLE.
This allows learners to immediately access the presentation, without needing to wait for it to download. With larger presentations this can be a long wait on a slow connection. As Slideshare allows you to navigate to a specific slide, this means that learners who want to look at one slide can more easily than from a whole Powerpoint.
Of course there are a few downsides, the main one is that Slideshare is an open service, so your presentations are public and you may not want that. Though that’s also an advantage in that there are lots of presentations on the site that you can use and embed into the VLE.
Being Flash based this could cause issues if your learners have lots of iPhones and iPads, however Slideshare now provide an iPhone friendly service.
It is very simple to link to Powerpoint files, however using a service like Slideshare allows you to easily embed not just your presentations, but also other presentations from the site, straight into the VLE.
Interesting presentation on how to present presentations.
A joint event between Becta and the MoD looking at the transformative impact that using learning technologies can have on education and training.
I delivered a ten minute presentation on how mobile learning is having an transformative impact at Gloucestershire College.
It is always a challenge to deliver a 61 slide presentation in just ten minutes!
No it wasn’t death by Powerpoint (partly as I was using Keynote on a Mac) but think of it as more as a video with a narration by me.
Always disappointed that I have only ten minutes which never allows time for the audience to think about what I am presenting on, no time for discussion, debate, reflection; no opportunity to engage with the technology, use the technology.
Ten minutes is never enough.
However it went down really well with the audience.
Though to be honest there was thirty minutes at the end of the day which did give an opportunity, but it was just thirty minutes.
Okay what about the rest of the day?
Well as is typical at these events, lots of presentations, lots of content, lots of Powerpoint slides, but I wonder if much learning happened? Certainly according to the feedback it stimulated debate and thought, so maybe I am being a little negative.
I know that at these events that part of the issue is that the organisers and stakeholders feel that they need to cram the event full of short presentations in order to “transfer information” and meet the needs of the differing stakeholders, as in everyone has to have their say and present their view or vision.
I would argue that sometimes you need to take a step back and ask yourself, what is the aim of the event, what are you trying to get out of the event?
As a delegate you should also be asking yourself what are you expecting from the event and what preparation did you do prior to the event?
The whole day was not entirely presentations and there was a panel session, some discussion sessions and a hands-on session. My view though was that the weighting was wrong with the presentations taking up too much of the day.
Or is it that I just don’t like listening to lots of presentations.
This is the sixth e-Learning Stuff Podcast, You say Asus and I say Asus…
[audio:http://elearningstuff.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/elearningstuff006.mp3]Download the podcast in mp3 format: You say Asus and I say Asus…
Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.
In this show, James is joined by Nick Jeans, Kev Hickey, Dave Foord, David Sugden and Lisa Valentine.
The discussion starts off looking at the role of the Asus EeePC and other netbooks on e-learning on colleges across the UK. The discussion also looks at the variety of presentation software now available from PowerPoint to Keynote, Open Office to Google Docs. Then there is other stuff as well…
Shownotes
Photo source.
There are some other nice things you can do with PowerPoint presentations apart from show them as just presentations, or even view them again.
PowerPoint slides can be easily saved as images as mentioned by Phil in his blog posting on this issue.
Show them on a mobile device, ie a mobile phone, a PSP, an iPod or similar. It should be noted that the iPod touch (and the iPhone) can show PowerPoint presentations natively using the media viewer. Presentations can either me sent via e-mail or moved to the iPod touch using one of the file management applications now available for it.
You could also incorporate the images of the slides into Microsoft Photostory 3 and add narration or even more images.
Phil in his blog posting talking about loading the images ontot a DVD.
I suppose you could even burn them onto a DVD and look at them on your TV via a DVD player: now that’s an exciting night in!
In terms of DVDs, one thing that I have done is to use Apple’s Keynote to import a PowerPoint presentation, and add a voice over and export as a movie. This movie as well as being exported to various mobile devices or embedded onto a webpage and I have taken this movie and burnt it to DVD.
One of the reasons for doing this is that some learners may not have a computer at home or a media capable mobile device, but probably have a (£15) DVD player from Asda or similar.
Today a lot of teaching staff are still using PowerPoint, but there is nothing to stop them or learners viewing those presentations in different ways and on different devices.
What we do is provide the hardware and software so that learners undertake the conversion process themselves. Though we are looking at tools to make the process easier and more transparent.
Apple announced iPhone 3G yesterday in a keynote by Steve Jobs at the WWDC in San Francisco. It will be available in the UK on the 11th July.
New features include:
Other new features are:
I wonder if the Keynote (iWork) and PowerPoint support also allows you to show the presentation via an AV cable in the same way you can do at the moment with video and images.
It will be interesting to see also if iWork (or even Office) support includes editing and creating support, or is it just going to be reading, I suspect the latter.
Of course there are also all the features announced when the iPhone SDK was released earlier this year which include:
I do like the fact that an educational institution can put apps on the iPhone (or the iPod touch) without needing to go through the Apple checking process and the iTunes App store.
Downside is that you now need to activate the phone in store, so now unlocking just became a lot more expensive as you will have to buy into a phone plan as well as the phone.
Today I have been at a JISC workshop on repurposing resources at which I gave a ten minute presentation on the institutional perspective on repurposing resources.
This gave me an opportunity to share my presentation with others.
Now I know I could just upload my PowerPoint presentation, but that means people need to download and open it. Problems arise as I used Apple’s Keynote presentation software and not everyone has that. Yes I can export to PowerPoint, but that is not always perfect, more so if you use some of the more advanced features of Keynote.
So I decided to use a feature of Keynote which is to send to Youtube.
This works quite well, though some institutions ban YouTube so less useful there then.
I also used Slideshare and uploaded my presentation there as well, though I had to export as PowerPoint first.
On both presentations there is (virtually) no audio, which to be honest the presentation does need. I think I prefer the YouTube version as it captures the transitions from Keynote which Slideshare doesn’t.
Another option would be to use Google’s Presentation.
Russell Stannard has posted a range of online animated guides that demonstrate various ways in which you can incorporate learning technologies into teaching.
These videos were created for teachers to help them to incorporate technology into their teaching. My own background is in teaching English, so some of the sites are specific to ELT and are grouped separately. The rest are for all teachers and there is also a section for those interested in more difficult multimedia products like Flash and Director.
The cover how to use iTunes, PowerPoint tips, creating blogs and many other things.
He has used Camtasia to produce the video guides. Personally I am a fan of Captivate which does a similar job, for those looking for a free tool, Wink is certainly one option which does work quite well.
Well worth a look.
Following my post about Presently, the official Google Blog has announced that they are releasing presentation software and are going to call it Presentation.
In April we announced that we were working to bring presentations to Google Docs. (Astute readers may recall learning about this even earlier, which caused a bit of excitement around here.) And today we’re unveiling the new Google Docs presentations feature and invite you to try it at documents.google.com. Maybe more than any other type of document, presentations are created to be shared. But assembling slide decks by emailing them around is as frustrating as it is time-consuming. The new presentations feature of Google Docs helps you to easily organize, share, present, and collaborate on presentations, using only a web browser.
This will provide a real solution to delivering online presentations and also enable learners to access PowerPoint presentations via the web (say delivered from a VLE). Not every learner will have Microsoft Office installed and though PowerPoint Viewer is an option for some, it is not an option for all.
Regardless of whether you think PowerPoint is not an useful e-learning tool (death by PowerPoint anyone) or is, it is used on a regular basis by a lot of practitioners across the world.
I think despite the dominance of Microsoft Office there is room for a web based presentation application and I am hoping that Presentation will fit the bill.