Playing with Presentations #1

So, my question is, 'What's the best way of displaying a presentation online?' Not only if you want to give people access to your presentation after the event, but also when you are giving the presentation live.

There are now so many different ways of doing this, that it's difficult to choose which one to use.

For example, we used the Elluminate virtual classroom for our live presentation on Gaming & Language Learning last Friday, using Learning Times. But, it might not have been the best way of showing people our slides (see post below). Of course, there are advantages to using this type of platform - the recording is done automatically, and the images are shown at the same time as the audio.

However, you cannot access the recording or attend live unless you are a member (it is free to join, and an easy process, but, even so, it is another barrier), and you cannot simply download the audio only to listen to when on the move (i.e. a podcast)

During the WiAOC, this virtual classroom option seems to be the most popular option, but there have been various alternatives used. For instance, Leigh Blackall's excellent keynote used a Flickr slideshow. The audio was provided by a World Bridges webcast & Skypecast, and it seemed to go very well.

Barbara Dieu (Bee), later today is also going to be using a Worldbridges webcast/Skypecast option, but she's going to use a tool called Zoho Show for her slides. The difference with this is that Barbara can control who sees what because the show is invitation only (by email) and she chooses which slides the participants see at which time from her end. It's a very interesting way of doing it, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it works in practice (I had a trial run with her a few days ago)

Apart from this, there's Bubbleshare and Slideshare too, and I'm sure many other tools (you can provide the slides as a video, with a voiceover).

So, I'm going to upload our presentation to a few different tools to compare them. I want to see how easy it is to upload the files, and look at the quality and feel of the presentation when using them. This will make it easier to decide the next time I have to do a presentation.


Here's the Flickr Slideshow:



Obviously, what's missing from this is an audio recording (I'll add this soon)