Beyond Method #7: Next Gen Presentations

Discovery Exercise:

1. Read Educause – 7 Things You Should Know About Next Generation Presentation Tools . I could not get this link to open.
2. Choose one tool and upload a presentation file to it and explore the various features/options offered. I decided to experiment by loading an existing  PowerPoint presentation into Sliderocket that I had used in my book club when we read "The Forest Lover" by Susan Vreeland. It introduced the life and work of the Canadian artist Emily Carr.
3. What your impressions are of Sliderocket? I found Sliderocket surprisingly easy to use. It was easy to edit and improve my presentation. This is a link to it. The extra features, like the survey tool and the statistics reporting, that come in the professional (fee-based) module would be worth investigating.
4. I have not had experience with any of the other tools mentioned here. I usually use PowerPoint and find it very easy and useful. The problem of bad PowerPoint presentations does not seem to be with the tool, but with presenters who use the tool badly. I would really like to explore Prezi in more detail when I have more time. I like the concept of a "game board" approach to illustrating ideas. Online presentation tools have been very useful for me in the past, to illustrate a talk, teach a concept, or highlight a display. If a patron came in to my library asking for recommendations on presentation tools that are freely available online, I could refer them to Sliderocket, but at this point I still could not offer much hands-on experience.
5. A free and easy website that was not mentioned here that I have used to create presentations is http://www.slide.com/. Here is a link to a presentation I created to illustrate a typical day at our library last year.