SlideCasting – Another ‘cast, another virtual presentation

I thought Podcasting, Screencasting, and Vodcasting, were enough, but now we have yet another term to throw into the mix: Slidecasting. As shared by Crafty, SlideShare now provides you with the ability to upload an audio file and sync your powerpoint slides to it.

Voila, instant online presentation.

This won’t put presenters out of business, people still like seeing their experts face to face, but it will make it much easier for people to A) get some prior knowledge and B) share their info intelligently with people who weren’t able to attend. My PowerPoint slides don’t really stand up on their own. They’re little more than visual prompts for me and cues for the audience to make connections. Without the audio, they’re worthless. Which is why I haven’t bothered to share much on SlideShare. I might need to rethink that one now.

Of course, I’m sure some of you are asking what’s the difference between this and a screencast? You could always just record your screen and page through the PowerPoint while you narrate it.

There are three differences as I see it. 1) Bandwidth. A screencast usually takes up a good chunk of space and requires some creative editing and converting to shrink it down. 2) Accessibility. This can be embedded into a web page, which makes it much easier to share. 3) Ease. Much easier to just edit your audio and then time out the slides, than to try to get a 45 minute screencast recorded right. Audio editing is easier than video editing (of course, some will argue that I’m sure).

Of course, it does make me wonder just what this means for presenters. As I’ve asked many times before, if everybody can watch your slides in sync with your voice a few days before you present to them, then how could one better use the time you have in front of the audience? Instead of simply doing a knowledge drop, could the collective intelligence in the room be harnassed to actually accomplish something tangible, something that would benefit the entire educational community?

How could we be using these new tools to break the mold and do things differently?

7 Comments

Michael Richards
7/24/2007

Steve, Slidecasting gives a chance for a presentation to transform itself. If people access the Slidecast ahead of time then the face to face conversation takes on a reflective and not reactive tone. People can ask those kinds of questions that move people from an investigative stage towards an integrative stage. A Slidecast coupled with a tool like twitter changes the whole idea of a presentation from an information dump to information buildup.

Slidecasting would also broaden the exposure of the intellectual property of the presenter in a way that the K12 Online Conference has done. As an example, if you were to put a Slidecast together then someone who might never have the opportunity to hear your presentation for whatever reason (geography, time, or $) would be able to benefit and thus reach an audience that you might never have reached.

Glenn Moses
7/24/2007

Beyond conferences, as classroom teachers, if you’re doing direct instruction you can narrate yourself over your slides and students can access that information as many times as needed as opposed to the one time it was presented it in class.

I’m also seeing applications for student use, to create content for a course. This is very cool. Thanks for pointing it out.

Michael Richards
7/24/2007

Taking off of what Glenn wrote, think about this kind of technology as a way of communicating with parents. I’ve done online safety workshops that are marginally attended but I could put both the slides (which I’ve done before) and audio together to make it accessible to parents who work and can’t attend or can’t find babysitters to watch their children. Bringing the content to the parents may come in handy when budgets are tight. Parents advocate for technology more if they have an understand of how it is being used in the classroom.

Nancy Sharoff
7/24/2007

Michael and Glenn have both made very valid comments. I also see this as a pre-workshop tool, whereby participants can view the slides (which hopefully they will need to interact with in some way) and then during the workshop time could actually be spent delving a bit deeper into the content and address questions/concerns raised by the participants. I’m really excited by the potential of this that I’m typing at the speed of light and getting my browser right on over there to check it out. Thanks again for sharing wonderful information! What would I do w/out you???? (uhhh….spend less time online????LOL)

BTW, just picked up Harrington’s & Rekdal’s book ‘How to Wow with PowerPoint’. I’m a firm believer that ‘powerpointlessness’ is really a factor of a poor creator rather than a poor product. I’ve got another PowerPoint book around here somewhere (buried in my Summer 2007 to-do pile) that I haven’t gotten to yet….

Andy Allen
7/30/2007

I’ve seem some Articulate Presentations that were done really well. http://www.articulate.com/products/studio.php . I’m really suprised that a lot of this functionality isn’t in powerpoint natively. A stand alone presentation (or as Microsoft likes to call it ‘a recorded broadcast’) is really just an extension of online learning.

Note, I once took a MBA class where the teacher handed out powerpoint slides as homework, and then read them vebatim at the next session. It was a terrible, boring class. It’s a tough mix because presentations really need to have more dialog than what’s on the screen to be interesting, but need that dialog for offline reference.

Jim
1/7/2009

I have used this ’slidecasting’ in my classroom before, and seen it done. At first I really enjoyed the little nuances that it could add to a lesson, but I found that during presentations these soon got old, and even my students lost interest quickly. I feel that you just cannot prepare for an audience beforehand. With my class its important to be able to react to questions.

However, this is an AMAZING tool for days when I am out of school. I can leave a presentation with a substitute and know that students will get a solid lesson. I feel that this is the real strength of ’slidecasting’.

Steve
1/8/2009

@Jim Great point. And I totally agree with you. But what if you used it to build prior knowledge? Laid down the groundwork, had them watch the basic content, and THEN spent the first five minutes of class doing a general summary of the presentation to prime the pump and then took off with the conversation/synthesis? I guess that’s what I”m wondering. I think you’re right, question and answer and discussion is the most important part, the part that can’t be saved to your desktop. So could these tools be used to MAXIMIZE the time available to engage in those activities?

No easy answer to that one. But something to chew on! Thanks for the contribution.

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