Thursday, October 20, 2011

Slide Sharing Sites

Spend some time exploring slide sharing sites, where you will find shows you can use in your teaching. Open an account on any of these sites, and you can save the shows you like as  your "favorites" for easy access later on. I highly recommend Slide Share, one of the original sites for slide sharing, which keeps getting better, offering newer and newer features.  I also like AuthorSteam, where if you add your own slide shows, you can later use the editing features on the site to enhance your show. VoiceThread is my favorite for interactivity because viewers can add written and audio comments, making the show engaging and evolving.

Here are three samples of slide shows that I found on SlideShare. I am offering the examples here to demonstrate that by grabbing the "embed" code at the site, you can easily place slide shows into a blog, website, or another similar form of media. The first SlideShare covers copyright and fair use in the educational setting; it provides excellent coverage of the topic, and also has embedded in the PowerPoint a YouTube video. The second SlideShare PowerPoint is one on creativity and visualization. The third one is an excellent use of PowerPoint to create a full film analysis of the Hitchcock's movie Vertigo. This last one demonstrates how a slide show allows us to create instructional materials that would be difficult to achieve in other ways, thereby illustrating the power of the medium and its ability to allow us to create teaching moments that otherwise might not be possible.  The fact that the slide presentation is archived in SlideShare also speaks to the beauty of this site for enabling us to find powerful instructional materials at our fingertips.

I have posted other blogs on SlideShare, AuthorStream, and VoiceThread. Check these postings. Also, let's spend some time exploring the sites, and please let others know about slide shows you find on any of the sites that you can use in your teaching. Also, once you open an account with any of these sites, you can place your own slide shows there for convenience, for instance, for you to easily access and for your students to access at home or at any time.

I encourage you to open a SlideShare and AuthorStream free account today; and if possible, if you can get a free 30-day demo of VoiceThread as an educator, take advantage of the opportunity. VoiceThread also has a VoiceThread K-12 section: ed.voicethread.com. Even if you never post your own creations on these sites--which you really should do, though--you will be impressed with what you can find, watch, download, download and edit, mark as a "favorite, etc. There is a wealth of resources awaiting you on Web 2.0 sharing sites such as these three slide sharing sites. AuthorStream will even enable you to turn your slide show into a video, which can then be further edited, or just simply saved as a video for watching.

Okay, plunge in, and be sure to post comments. Also, let us know what you think of the SlideShare video on copyright and fair use. Note you can watch the three embedded videos right from this blog, and you can also watch them full screen. You can also click to watch them within SlideShare.

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