WHAT IS PRESENTATION SHARING?

* This chapter is part of TACCLE handbook - available on Creative Commons Attribution - Non commercial - Share Alike 2.0 Belgian licence.

The availability of Software such as PowerPoint has enabled teachers to create professional presentations quickly and easily and to store them on their own computer. Teachers and lecturers are doing this every day, as are people
from outside the education sector. There are over 300 million PowerPoint users in the world who do 30 million presentations every day. Many of them are happy to share their presentations with others. This represents an invaluable resource for teachers and for students. A wide range of software applications exist which allow this to happen.

Some of them are purely for sharing presentations you have already created, using, for example, Windows PowerPoint or Mac Keynote. These include SlideShare and SlideBurner. Others such as mPOWER allow you to create a new presentation from scratch as well as sharing your presentation with users worldwide or publishing it to the web.

Some are free to users, such as SlideShare, others are free initially but have a subscription system once you have used over a certain amount of space e.g. SlideBurner. Still others, like PPTExchange, not only enable users to store presentations but act as a market place where PowerPoint presentations can be bought, sold or traded. Some, like authorSTREAM, produce a ‘lite’ version, which is free, but charge for the full version.

They all work in more or less the same way.

HOW THEY WORK

On the free sites, anyone can access the presentations that have been uploaded. Presentations can be searched by author, topic or title in the normal way. Some of these are watch-only, others can be downloaded, depending on the author’s preference. Presentations by the same author and related presentations are also shown. There is a facility
for commenting on the presentations. If you want to upload your own presentations you normally need to register for an account.

We recommend SlideShare as it is easily the biggest, is easy to use and is free. It also seems to have more teachers using it than other sites so the material is likely to be more relevant. You create your slide show, tag it and upload it onto a host site. You are given the option of making it private or public, available or not available as a download for other users and can also indicate whether other users can reuse or repurpose it for another context.

Publishing and embedding
Every presentation uploaded gets a unique url that can be embedded in blogs, websites, LMS, email or even other PowerPoint presentations! More recently, new generation software such as authorSTREAM allows its users to share their presentations on Apple iPod or iPhone or on equivalent devices and to upload it on YouTube. AuthorSTREAM also supports sounds, gif animations and narrations within a PowerPoint presentation.