Web Presentations

Overview:

The web can be helpful both in giving live presentations in face-to-face settings as well as creating multimedia for audiences to view entirely on their own.  In today’s lab, we will be introducing free tools to meet both scenarios.

Objectives:
  1. To understand web-based options for presenting slideshow content to a live audience.
  2. To learn about how you can convert your slideshows into stand-alone web-based multimedia experiences.
  3. To create an embeddable presentation on your own web page or blog.
The More You Know:

Google Presentation

Presenting to a Live Audience

PowerPoint is pretty much the standard for presentations these days.  However, some newer applications allow users to create slideshow presentations within them or allow users to upload slides to them.  Because these presentations are web-based, they can be given from any computer without needing to download a file.

Because the presentations are web-based, you can invite other users to view the presentation on their own screens–regardless of whether they are in the same room.  Additionally, both the applications below (Google Presenter & Zoho Show) integrate live chat components into the presentation allowing viewers to comment during the presentation without interrupting the speaker(s).  And finally, the presentations allow for multiple users to take control of the presentation at any time (and they don’t have to be in the same physical space)!

As you explore these applications, monitor your understanding by your ability to respond to these questions:

Zoho Show 2.0

  1. What is the process for designing slides within each program?
  2. What is the process for uploading slides for each program?
  3. How do you invite people to your presentation?
  4. How does chat work within the presentations?
  5. How can presenters make sure all viewers are seeing the same slides at the same time?
  6. How can you embed a presentation in a web page or blog?

Live Presentation Applications:

  1. Google Docs
  2. Zoho Show

You may have noticed that although you can embed your presentations with either Google Docs or Zoho Show, neither allows you to include audio from the talk. Which leads us to…

SlideShare

Pre-recorded Presentations for the Web

Whereas Google Docs and Zoho Show are powerful tools for giving live presentations, other options such as SlideShare or VoiceThread might be more applicable if you wanted to capture both audio and images in your presentation.  Unlike Google Docs and Zoho Show which are quite similar, Slideshare and VoiceThread are quite different.  As you explore each, keep in mind how the two apps differ in how they incorporate audio and how viewers can respond to slides. To help you monitor your understanding as you explore the resources below, be sure you can answer the following guiding questions.

  1. What is the process for uploading media to each site?
  2. What is the process for adding/syncing audio to individual slides/threads?
  3. What is the process for embedding/sharing presentations with others?
  4. What commenting options do viewers have for each application?

VoiceThread

SlideShare’s Slidecasts

VoiceThread

Your Performance Tasks:

Each of you will be presenting in two sessions during the RELATe Conference on Thursday.  This lab not only serves as practice using these presentation technologies, but is designed to help you get started on one of your artifacts for the conference–your web-based session archives.  For this lab we would like each of you to

  1. Take one of your presentations (Imagery, PowerPoint, etc.) and upload it to either Google Presenter or Zoho Show.
  2. Take your other (or the same, if you only have one) presentation (Imagery, PowerPoint, etc.) and upload it to either SlideShare or VoiceThread and add audio narration to explain your thinking.
  3. Embed these two presentations into a web page that you can submit to us (both sites give you the iframe code to do this)

Note: We will not be grading the “quality” of your content at this point (that is part of your RELATe Conference grade).  Rather, we want to see you use these web-based technologies to practice for you face-to-face performances.

Due Date:

All tasks for this lab must be completed by 8:00 a.m., Monday, July 12th.  Please share the links to your web page(s) in the comments section below.

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