[cjlwright]

Have recently come across a useful looking site www.slideshare.net

It is only in the Beta stage. However it looks a useful way for sharing simple (no hyperlinks/animations etc) PowerPoints with students. Simply paste the link into your blog and there you go. It also allows you to embed the shows in your website (though I haven't tried this out yet).

I've always found it frustrating that I am effectively excluding my Mac owning students by offering PowerPoint downloads as there is no free reader for PowerPoint 2003 for Macs - this gets round that AND the PowerPoint doesn't take up any of my valuable file space on my blog!

Looks like the site developers will be working on including custom animations, hyperlinks etc as it develops.

I also like the idea of getting the students to upload their efforts to the site - lots of potential there.

Could be one to watch...

[A Finemess]

Well it seems to work OK. I uploaded a short slideshow and then put a link into one of my pupil blogs. Worked a treat. A bit concerned about breach of copyright tho' so I have now deleted it. If you look at the site regs it says that intellectual copyright belongs to them.

Looks to have potential as you say.

[Nick Dennis]

cjlwright, on Oct 27 2006, 06:02 PM, said:

I've always found it frustrating that I am effectively excluding my Mac owning students by offering PowerPoint downloads as there is no free reader for PowerPoint 2003 for Macs - this gets round that AND the PowerPoint doesn't take up any of my valuable file space on my blog!

You can ask the students to use OpenOffice. It may not be great but it works. You can export ppt to different formats too. Do your students know that Microsoft make Office for the mac too?

[DAJ Belshaw]

Nick Dennis, on Oct 27 2006, 07:40 PM, said:

cjlwright, on Oct 27 2006, 06:02 PM, said:

I've always found it frustrating that I am effectively excluding my Mac owning students by offering PowerPoint downloads as there is no free reader for PowerPoint 2003 for Macs - this gets round that AND the PowerPoint doesn't take up any of my valuable file space on my blog!

You can ask the students to use OpenOffice. It may not be great but it works. You can export ppt to different formats too. Do your students know that Microsoft make Office for the mac too?

There's also NeoOffice (a Mac-specific version of OpenOffice) and you can always convert your Powerpoints to Flash... I agree, though, that SlideShare's a great idea!

Doug

[cjlwright]

Nick Dennis, on Oct 27 2006, 07:40 PM, said:

cjlwright, on Oct 27 2006, 06:02 PM, said:

I've always found it frustrating that I am effectively excluding my Mac owning students by offering PowerPoint downloads as there is no free reader for PowerPoint 2003 for Macs - this gets round that AND the PowerPoint doesn't take up any of my valuable file space on my blog!

You can ask the students to use OpenOffice. It may not be great but it works. You can export ppt to different formats too. Do your students know that Microsoft make Office for the mac too?

I hear you Nick, but problem is that still leads to a similar problem of 'my dad wouldn't let me install it so...' Also I've been quite surprised since coming into teaching a few years ago at how computer illiterate a lot of the 'ICT generation' are. Especially so here in Italy where I am working at the moment as it’s a little behind the UK in term so use of ICT. To be honest I think a lot of my kids would hesitate at the idea of installing a new piece of software! Some didn't even have an email address until I made them get one recently!

Nonetheless I will continue to try and convince my kids of the wonders of open source software: if more people realised it then Microsoft would be struggling (or better still they might be pulling their fingers out and producing superior quality software!).

[Carl Fazackerley]

What about using the pps format? PowerPoint allows you to export the program materials to present in this way with no installation necessary/

[cjlwright]

Cheers Carl, I'm going to take a closer look at pps (which I never even knew existed!). Can this be accessed from pretty much any computer without PowerPoint (including Macs)?

[Carl Fazackerley]

cjlwright, on Oct 29 2006, 03:41 PM, said:

Cheers Carl, I'm going to take a closer look at pps (which I never even knew existed!). Can this be accessed from pretty much any computer without PowerPoint (including Macs)?

The pupils may need PowerPoint viewer which is a free download from Microsoft. Or here for the Mac version



The other option that requires no installations for the students is to convert the PowerPoint to Flash using OpenOffice.

This post has been edited by Carl Fazackerley: 29 October 2006 - 06:46 PM