presentation | Designed to Inspire

Presentation: Slideshare

I don't care if you call it web 2.0 or a banana split, there are some cool Internet based tools out there! I've been having fun with slideshare (see my "Drupal as a PLE" slide show post). It takes a couple of steps to set up a free account that (for now) requires the added step of requesting an invitation. After that, you can upload your slides to the hosted site, share the link and embed it in a blog. There are also social networking components (kind of like YouTube, but for presentations) which allow you to tag your presentations for easy search by others. Per the slideshare blog, it looks like conferences are starting to use slideshare a means of sharing conference presentations. I wonder if there is a way to sync up the audio or video?

Effective Writing and Presentation for Instruction

My new textbooks have started to roll in and I am getting really excited about digging into the new semester! I flipped through the texts for my Effective Writing in Instructional Technology course. The books hit on all the "common sense" factors that often are lost in the excitement of jazzing up a Power Point presentation and loading up the page with the cutest cut and paste clip art. The citations for the books (and links to Amazon.com) are listed below. The Handbook brings the writer back to three main points - Make the content 1) Easy to Use, 2) Easy to Understand and 3) Easy to Find. Again, all common sense points, but not so easy to execute. In addition, I highly recommend the Presentation Zen blog in which Garr Reynold's covers "issues related to professional presentation design." He has a wonderful way of dissecting why some presentation techniques work and others don't. I also follow the Creating Passionate Users blog written by authors from Head First books, an O'Reilly series, who often cover topics related to how people process and respond to messages in writing and presentations. Cool stuff.

Kostelnick, C & Roberts, D.D. (1998). Designing visual language: Strategies for professional communicators. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. ISBN: 0-205-20022-2

iTunes Handles Podcast .pdf File Enclosers - Who Knew?

Playing around with iTunes podcasts today, I noticed that iTunes recognizes .pdf file enclosures in podcasts and allows you to add .pdf files to your iTunes Library. I guess this may be old news to some, but it was news to me. Cool idea for distributing class bulletins and notes, turning in assignments, responding to peer reviews, etc. I attached a .pdf file here just to test it out and I was able to download the .pdf file from within iTunes podcasts and then go back to it in the iTunes library for later viewing. I also double checked it on the Apple site and here is a list of iTunes supported file formats: .m4a, .mp3, .mov, .mp4, .m4v, and .pdf.

Camtasia

I downloaded a trial version of Camtasia and will be doing some side by side comparisons to the Windows Media Encoder. Clearly, Camtasia wins early points for ease of use in a bundled software package. The WM encoder simply captures the file and saves it in .wmv. Then, you have to figure out what to do with it (edit it, convert it, etc) all on your own. In a few minutes, I downloaded the Camtasia software, recorded a few second screen cast, saved it in a flash format and uploaded it to my server for your viewing enjoyment :)

Windows Media Encoder

Today, I am testing out the (free) Windows Media Encoder as a means of capturing video and audio on my computer screen (kind of a poor woman's Camtasia). Yes, it is Windows only. Overall, the learning curve to get WM encoder going was not too bad. For whatever reason, Microsoft is gearing the software solely to "professionals", but I think they are missing a large audience who would like a down and dirty way to capture video by labeling it a "professional" product. There is still a huge mountain to climb to perfect the quality, but I was able to "produce" this 3 minute first attempt in less than an hour. I am also playing around with ways to host the video. I uploaded my first attempt (in .wmv format) to Google video, YouTube and my site's server. At first blush, the Google video and YouTube options are way to small to read the screen capture. However, it took all of 30 seconds to upload and embed in a blog post, so I will keep that in mind for quick projects that don't require detailed video. Here is a link to the file that I uploaded on my web server. Not bad, but I'm going to tinker around with ways to view from other web based players.