How 2 Share Presentations or Documents on the Web

Powerpoint has pretty much replaced posterboard for research projects that are either supposed to be "more fun" than traditional research papers, or that really do need more visuals than straight text.

However - there are a great many possible formats to these, and the introduction of Microsoft Office 2007, with its members-only format, has made transferring these projects from student computer to teacher computer extra-difficult.

Plus - there's always the problem of "I saved the wrong version" or "my email won't let me send a file that big".

Try www.slideshare.net



Slideshare will handle up to 100MB files in the following formats:
Presentations: pdf, ppt, pps, pptx, ppsx, pot, potx (Powerpoint); odp (OpenOffice); key, zip (Apple Keynote).
Documents: pdf, doc, docx, rtf, xls (MSOffice); odt, ods(OpenOffice); Apple iWork Pages.

You can choose for your document to be viewable by the whole world, just you, or somewhere in between. You can make your file downloadable or not.

This is a free site but it requires a log-in. There is also a short wait time while your file is processed before you can access it. For this blog post, I created a 3-slide powerpoint file and it took just a few seconds to upload, and it was availble for viewing in about 3 minutes.

Not only can your presentation now be viewed (small or full-screen) from any internet-connected computer, but you can generate embed code to post anywhere AND you can email a link to anyone. If you like, slideshare will import your address book from most of the popular webmail services.

Others (from the world, or from the list of people you invited) can leave comments.

There are tools on the site to add in an audio file to create what they call a "slidecast" - this is not to upload music - it's intended for a recording of a speaker who might be using the presentation. [note: make this recording with audacity] If you click on the link for that option, there are several help files available that will guide you through the process of synchronizing the audio file and the visual of your slides.


You can even post a transcript of the audio portion of your presentation.

Most of the presenters at an educational technology convention I recently attended used this site to post the presentation materials they used. A few talked about how they taught their students to use it for projects.

Here's the presentation I created to test this out:

Sample Presentation

View more presentations from awaldfogle.

How 2 make embeddable screen shots and even movies

This one involves some software that you have to install on your computer - but it's free, and free is a good price.

It's also AWESOME and so handy I can't believe I survived before discovering it.

www.jingproject.com

I use this to create virtually all of the screen-shots that I post on this blog - mostly because of the awesome ability to instantly generate imbed code. The image itself is posted on Jing's website, and the embed code is saved to my clipboard.

You can download files too, but so far I've only used the embed code generator - there's a tiny bit of work involved in creating a button to generate embed code, but the help information walks you right through it.

You can also draw a screen-shot box and record a video clip of what you're doing on the screen. If you have a microphone on your computer, it will record your voice as you describe what you're doing. Again, you can tell it to generate imbed code and you get something like this:



There's a video on the jing site that goes into more detail - but I can promise you, once you start playing with this, you will use it for EVERYTHING!!!

How 2 record an audio clip

the website is www.vocaroo.com and it's a terrific little free gizmo that allows you to record an audio message through your computer's built-in or plug-in microphone and will then generate a link or embed code for it.

Nothing to download and no limit on the length, but there is no edit or download. Still - it's pretty darned cool.