Online presentation sharing with Slideshare

PowerPoints have become a running cultural joke. We all know what a bad PowerPoint presentation looks like, since we’ve seen so many examples through the years. In some professions, we’re asked to not only sit through dozens if not hundreds of presentations throughout our careers, we’re also often expected to deliver our own presentations to managers, colleagues, and-in some cases- even would-be employers.
With so much at stake for our potential future employment prospects, you’d think we could invest more time and effort in preparing people to be effective communicators and give better presentations.

TEACHERS are one group whose members are expected to expected to give countless presentations throughout their careers. Obviously, not every kindergarten teacher in the US is required to deliver weekly PowerPoint presentation to his or her class, but it’s hard to imagine educators in this country who don’t at least use PowerPoint presentations as a learning resource in their own professional development. Many teachers browse online content from other educators in compiling information and lesson plans, and also sharing and collaborating with their colleagues.

What if there were a tool to browse literally millions of PowerPoint presentations online, on all variety of topics including education, technology, entertainment, science, and others?

Slideshare to the rescue!

Slideshare has become the go-to resource for finding and sharing online presentations with over XX active users, kind of like a “YouTube for PowerPoints,” if you will. Of course, the other side of the YouTube analogy also fits, as content creators can share their presentations online for free. But more on that last part in a little bit…

With apologies to the folks at CommonCraft, let’s examine the value of online presentation tools such as Slideshare by taking a quick look at how life used to be in the days before such tools existed…

From the teacher’s perspective, we can even take another step back and look at the “Old, OLD way”…

In the beginning, there was a teacher and a blackboard.

If you wanted to teach something new to your class, maybe you talked to some of your colleagues from your school in discussing lesson plan ideas, perhaps you visited the school library to do some basic research on your topic of interest. All these acitivities took a lot of your TIME as a teacher- time you could no longer use for other worthwhile teaching tasks.

After the “old, old way” came the next generation of teacher presentations. PowerPoint replaced the traditional blackboard as the preferred teaching medium in many classrooms, and educators could now exchange presentations with one another by swapping thumb drives.

Of course, that’s assuming you can even find that blasted file in the first place. Now where the heck did I leave that file anyway!?

The cool part is that I can also control who has access and can see my presentations online. By hitting the “Publish” button and making the video public, I’m effectively sharing my presentation with anyone on the web who wants to see it. Others can comment on my presentation and I can see which ones have been viewed or downloaded the most. I can also tell others how I’d like my content to be reused by selecting the appropriate license on Slideshare. A Creative Commons license, for instance, allows others to reuse my content and I can specify if I don’t want it to be modified or used for commercial purposes. Here’s what it looks like from the user’s end…

On the flip side, I get instant access to millions of online presentations just by searching on Slideshare. Personally, I find that I can quickly browse through an overview presentation on Slideshare in a fraction of the time that it takes to read through an online article or publication. So not only am I saving time in organizing and finding my own content, I’m also saving time finding and utilizing others’ content. And anything that saves us time as a teacher is golden!

So far, we’ve been focusing on the teacher’s perspective, but what about the student?

Like teachers, students also are asked to deliver countless presentations throughout their years in the classroom. And whether they’re individual or group presentations, technology is playing an increasingly important role in how students are being asked to communicate information about their learning. So why not combine a lesson or unit on basic presentation skills with online presentation tools such as Slideshare while also addressing critical skills related to finding, evaluating, and using information?

So why not combine a lesson or unit on basic presentation skills with online presentation tools such as Slideshare while also addressing critical skills related to finding, evaluating, and using information?

Heck, maybe your students could even teach YOU a thing or two about using Slideshare to publish presentations online…

In review, I’d like you to remember two important things about online presentation tools like Slideshare…

First, they make your information safe, organized, and findable. No more wasted hours spent looking for that all-important PowerPoint presentation from three years ago that you might have remembered to save on your external hard drive before your old computer crashed. Maybe…

Second, the sharing part makes the whole venture more social and fun. You open up your knowledge and ideas to the world and hopefully do your own part in raising the bar on quality in the process. Enjoy!