I have been playing with a number of presentation tools in the last few days. It all started with a message from Jon Johnson asking why the links in my ‘ICT Examples in Education’ presentation that I have uploaded to SlideShare don’t work. This has been a bug bear for me recently as hyperlinks used to work in SlideShare but don’t seem to anymore. I left a message on their online forum and had a response to say that this is a known issue and that they are working on it. I decided to explore other options again and this was the beginning of many hours on the net over the weekend. I still like SlideRocket but as this is in invite only beta at the moment, I decided to not focus my efforts there. I also revisited CogDog’s presentation on story telling tools as I was playing around SO…here are some of the tools I tried and presentations I either created within them or found by others who had used the tool.

280 Slides

A virtual buddy first alerted me to this on Twitter and I have to say that it is a lovely little application. It is built to look like Keynote (Mac application) but is online and open to anyone. It doesn’t have some of the bells and whistles at this point with no animations, audio or transitions but the interface is super easy to use and it really feels like you are using sofware from your own computer. One thing to be a wary of is changing the theme after you have already created a number of slides. It seemed to then shift some of the content around on the slide and some of the pictures seemed to disappear and had to be added again. Also, there is no hyperlinking options at the moment which is the main thing I was looking for but having emailed feedback to the team, they promised that hyperlinking is on its way (maybe as soon as next week!). I love the fact that I can embed a web video from places such as YouTube and that I can download my presentation as a Powerpoint. I set up this presentation below for a session I did on RSS and I used this online in full screen mode with no problems at all.

AuthorStream

I had played with this quite a long time ago but revisited it as I experimented. Again, I was impressed with this tool. It allows for animations on the slides and hyperlinks work perfectly. I will be uploading my ICT Examples in Education presentation to this site. Note: uploading is proving a little problematic – where is the perfect tool! I have embedded an example from their site instead.

Uploaded on authorSTREAM by bebeee

MyPlick

I have not yet tried making one of these myself but I am quite impressed at how easy it appears to be to combine and sync slides with audio using this tool. I have embedded an example I found on the site.

I have more tools to come but this will do for this post!

1) The page is a set to A4 portrait size which would seem to make it impossible to play around with some layouts. However, if you embed the page into a wiki and play around with the width and height settings in the embed code, you can change the size of the area you are working on. Instead of shrinking the page while keeping the same dimensions, playing with the embed size settings will actually cut off areas of the page. This is how I got my page to look the way it does in the picture. I heard about this site when visiting Lenva at Bucklands Beach Intermediate School. The kids there use Glogster to make the front navigation page of their online portfolios. Some of the children have moved into using Wikispaces for their portfolios and you can see an example of a student called Jess by clicking here.

I have embedded my Glogster page into my educational software wiki and you can go and check it out by clicking here (the picture above is just a screenshot)

I have had an evening of playing around on the computer and I have picked up a few more interesting sites.

Searching
Mahalo is a search engine that is written by human beings rather than machine compiled. Each returned entry is guaranteed to be of a high quality and spam free. There is stuff on education but most of it is written at a higher level than primary. What I did see looked really good and I have signed up to ge a writer on Mahalo where I get money for each entry I add. I will let you know if I get accepted! You can install a Firefox add-on that will display Mahalo search results next to your goodle results.

Search Radar is a search engine that helps you refine your searches. When you enter a search term, it gives you a tag cloud of related search terms to help you narrow your search. Under the tag cloud there is a list of sites for the search terms you used. Again you can install a Firefox extension that will show you a list of related search terms next to any Google search results (replacing the Google Ads!)

Powerpoint Type Applications – Slide Rocket
While SlideRocket is not yet launched (I have sent a request in to have an account), this looks very exciting. Many of the online office applications do not seem to prioritise good looking presentation applications and most seem pretty basic. SlideRocket promises to make great use of the potential that being a web based application affords it. It is planning to have links with services such as Flickr so that you can bring in images to you slides. The interface looks great – can’t wait to try this one out.

News From the Cluster
I haven’t really used this blog to share what is happening in our cluster the way that I envisioned I would when I set it up! That is something that I need to change. There is a webquest that a teacher called Hayley has set up at Wilford School that is well worth sharing. She has used a wiki to set up the webquest that is about Hauora (the Maori word for well-being) and looks at Food and Nutrition, Emotional Health, Environmental Issues and Physical Heath (exercise). This is a great resouce that anyone can tap into. The address of the webquest is http://hauora.pbwiki.com

1. Search ’shortcuts’
If you are using Firefox, you can set up a search shortcut for sites that you visit often that have a search window. Go to the site, right click on the search window and choose ‘Add a Keyword for this Search’. Once you have assigned a keyword, you can type it into the address box of the browser and then type your search terms afterwards. For instance, I have assigned a shortcut to my search box on my website. I now don’t have to visit the site, I just type me (my search keyword) and then my search terms such as fractions into the address window and I get the search results when I push enter.

2. Webslides
As the video below shows, this service lets you select a group of webpages to turn into a slideshow giving people a chance to look at each page. You have to email them to get an invite to test this and I am still waiting for one but I think it looks pretty interesting.

3. l8r
This service allows you to set a date into the future for an email to be delivered (up to five years). Wouldn’t this be an interesting writing exercise for kids. Write a letter to yourself five years into the future! I found out about this service on this Mashable blog post about 75 different email services available.

4. Fuser
While I couldn’t get this working properly for me, I have still put it here because I think the idea behind it is great. It takes all of your email accounts and Facebook, and brings all of that mail into one place. I have emailed them telling them the problems I have having so watch this space (while I was writing this blog entry, I got an email from their customer service – lightning fast reply! It may be to do with some settings I changed in Firefox so you should check this out)

I’m also revisiting the online office applications that I am already signed up to such as Zoho and ThinkFree as well as trying out new ones like Contact Office and will let you know in my next post what I think of them.