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.

One day, all of the people on the Internet will have an unlimited area to store all the digital media files they could ever want. Storage space is getting cheaper and digital files are getting smaller with the use of better compression techniques. What do people do now though? Let me give you a couple of situations where the storage dilemma rears its ugly head. Here at the University of Mary Washington, we’re moving to a hosted Blackboard solution, and the dilemma is that there will now be a smaller storage area (100MB quota) for files associated with a given course. For some faculty that could mean three, two, or even one PowerPoint presentation.

The other situation is our umwblogs.org installation also has a 100MB limit (though we do have some control over that limit). Where will users store their video and audio content? Privacy is also a concern for these files. How do we keep the control over who sees a PowerPoint presentation? YouTube is a great place to store video, but can those videos be made private? This article will provide those answers and more. Luckily, those answers involve using very cheap web services (as in free).

Make your files smaller

No matter where you store your files, you will want to make them as small as possible. When it comes to PowerPoint, keeping the presentation simple will make for smaller file sizes. However, if you use pictures, your presentations can balloon in size. So here is a way to make the pictures in your presentation smaller.

• How to compress photos in a PowerPoint presentation (step-by-step instructions)
• The Screencast version (this screencast references a video on how to create a photo album in Powerpoint)

Use “sharing” web sites

An alternative to sharing the PowerPoint files directly with the recipient, either through something like Blackboard, or through email, is to use a sharing site. Slideshare is a service that allows the sharing of PowerPoint presentations. You create an account, then upload your file and it gets converted into a Flash version for presenting on the web. You can present the small version or use the full-screen option. The Flash version does not include the animations or transitions that you use, but there is an option for downloading the original file which will keep those effects in tact. There is also an option for creating a private web address for sharing the file with only selected people. You can upload up to a 100MB file.

If you want to store and share video, we do recommend YouTube. Even though videos can be made private, faculty may be reticent to use it because of YouTube’s free-form nature and the sometimes objectionable content.

If that is an issue, we recommend a service called DivShare. For your video, as well as audio storage needs, DivShare will give you up to 5GB (gigabytes) of space to store your media. Just as a warning, you are allowed only 10GB worth of downloads per month, so you may at some point want to limit who you share your files with. You can make any audio or video files private. They use an un-guessable web address to link to the media. A built-in audio or video player will play the file on the web page. DivShare also supports images, PDF documents, Microsoft Word documents, as well as PowerPoint files. It converts those files to Flash documents as well.

Using UMWBlogs

All of the sharing sites we mentioned, YouTube, Slideshare, and DivShare, and others we didn’t mention, all work very well in concert with the umwblogs.org environment (in fact many were created with blogging platforms in mind). UMWBlogs also offers a variety of privacy protections, and it functions in a much superior way to Blackboard in terms of media presentation. You may want to consider using UMWBlogs for a course website.

photo credit: William Hook