New Media Center

Just as YouTube is a video sharing website, SlideShare is a service that allows the sharing of presentations that were created using PowerPoint, Keynote (for the Mac), Open Office, and even PDF slideshows. The idea behind Slideshare is similar to YouTube. You upload your presentations and they are then converted for presentation on a web page. The presentations can then be viewed at a specific page on Slideshare.net or you can use code that is provided to embed the presentation on your own web site. You can even embed the slideshow in a Course Management tool such as Blackboard.

SlideShare also has a great feature for adding audio to your presentation called Slidecasting. Let’s say you gave a presentation publicly and audio was captured. You could take the audio file and synchronize it with the slides to create a Slidecast. The slideshow would play automatically with synchronized audio, providing a presentation that was just like the live event.

Keep in mind that you do lose any animated transitions that you used in your presentation, however the original slideshow can be downloaded by a visitor with all the transitions and animations in tact. You can upload up to a 100MB presentation, so it’s a great way to keep from using up space on a web server or course management system. There are also privacy settings that allow you to share a “private” web address for your presentation. It won’t show up on a list anywhere and the web address is virtually un-guessable.

Overall, SlideShare is a pretty valuable service. Features are being added regularly like support for PowerPoint 2007, the ability to incorporate YouTube videos into presentations, and the ability to view presentations easily on a mobile phone.

YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. It’s been around since mid-February 2005 and most people know it as a place to watch millions of silly videos. However, YouTube is one of hundreds of popular “social” websites which allow you to sign-up and have a “space” that you can call your own. You can watch the videos, mark them as favorites, save them to a playlist, and leave comments (even video comments). You can also subscribe to other users and get notified when their new videos appear on YouTube.

The video above shows an example of how you can embed a video in a web page. YouTube provides the code that you need to publish a video, but it still is hosted on YouTube’s servers so you don’t have to worry about providing your own space to host video. They even provide customization for how your video is presented on a web page.

Watching videos is only the beginning. You can also be a video producer, and YouTube can be your screening room. Their motto is “Broadcast Yourself” and there is a whole host of resources that can help with the entire process, from shooting your video all the way to promoting it on YouTube.

So if you haven’t already go watch some videos at YouTube. Then sign-up for an account if you want to participate. The UMW New Media Center has several articles where we talk more about YouTube. We especially recommend that you start with “Making Movies for YouTube“. Also, Columbia University has an In-depth Look at YouTube that is quite good and filled with valuable information. If you have any questions feel free to contact us.

del.icio.us links for YouTube

Yes, I know how to spell presentations in case you were wondering. Prezintation is just my bad attempt at a pun in order to turn your attention to Prezi.com.

If you somehow missed it, by clicking the little image above you can get a preview of what Prezi does. So click now, I can wait.

Now that you are back you are probably wondering how exactly you can make a sweet presentation like that. Well the first step is to sign up for a free account. The one current drawback is that it is still in private beta, but don’t let that stop you from trying out this cool app.

Next you can check out the learn tab and see how easy it is to create visually appealing presentations. The website says it the best, “Prezi is the ultimate tool for the creative, the child-like, those who want to impress their audience, and those who like shiny objects. It might look scary and confusing first, but it is, in fact, self-explanatory and easy to use”. If you think you fall into one of those catgeories (or many like I do) than Prezi just the tool for you.