ESL SUPERBLOG / wiaoc2007

Slideshare is a great tool for sharing presentations too. It's easy to embed the resulting slideshow on your blog, etc., and the site has social software/community tools too (you can send other users messages, post comments, choose slideshows as favourites, add slideshows to your library). It does have one problem though - once uploaded, it doesn't seem like you can delete a slideshow (or at least I tried to find out how to do it and failed miserably - I uploaded the wrong version of a presentation and wanted to replace it with another one) - so, be sure that what you upload is something you don't mind being there forever.

Here's our presentation on Slideshare:

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)

The Webheads in Action Online Convergence (WiAOC 2007) is now well underway, with so much activity going on it's impossible to keep up.

Fortunately, most of it, if not all, is being recorded, so we can go back and listen and watch to the presentations that we missed becuase we were too busy to attend them live, or because time zone factors made them impractical to attend.

Details of the presentations to come are here : http://schedule.wiaoc.org/

I really do encourage everyone to go along to some of them

I gave a presentation yesterday, with my British Council colleague Kyle Mawer. It was essentially a repeat of the presentation that we gave at APAC and IATEFL, on 'Computer Games & Language Learning: From Space Invaders to Second Life', although
we end up changing the format every time we do it: adding or removing slides, etc.

It's also been interesting to see how we have decided to change the pitch depending on the audience and how the experience has differed because of the participants and the venue.

Of course, yesterday was the first time we presented it online, and that in itself led to additional challenges and a totally different dynamic. One thing that was very different was not actually showing the games themselves, which we normally do when we've presented this f2f.

We also had some annoying hiccups to yesterday's presentation. Here's a copy of an email that I've just sent to the Webheads list that detils what happened:

Thanks to everyone who attended our presentation at Learning Times
yesterday.

We had a few problems with Elluminate, which I thought I'd share with
you all in case it helps others - it all went to show you that you can
prepare as much as you like, but you can never prepare for the unexpected!

- We used jpgs for our presentation, and when we'd uploaded the images
for the presentation, we found that if you use anything other than
Safari, they are huge. Unfortunately, we didn't have enough time to do
anything about this.

- We had 80 slides, and exceeded the Elluminate maximum. So, as we got
near the end of the uploaded slides, we had to delete some to make
space. You can delete slides by right-clicking over the slide (you'll
find the erase slide option if you are a moderator)

- We were able to view the slides fine when they were uploaded, but
just as we started, the screen section of Elluminate went blank for us
and we couldn't see any of the slides. Fortunately our audience could!

It did make it difficult speaking about the slides without being able
to see them, and I had to switch between my Powerpoint and the
Elluminate interface, which made things a little awkward.

- Kyle Mawer, my co-presenter's headphones stopped working just before
we were going to start (we were physically in the same space, so we
decided to share headphones). Then, just after Vance introduced us, my
(bluetooth) headphones cut out, so I had to scramble for another pair.

What a combination of gremlins! We were exhausted when it was finally
over, but it was a lot of fun.

Details of this presentation and the other WiAOC recordings are here: http://home.learningtimes.net/learningtimes?go=1563545

The direct link to the elluminate recording is here

You'll need to create an account (free) to access the Learning Times recording, but this is well worth it - the community has lots of very interesting resources, and you'll meet some great people there.