Teach42

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.

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.

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.

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….

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.