What is my deal with PowerPoint recently? I guess I have really been looking for ways to do PowerPoints online. I love Google’s efforts to put Office-like applications online. But they are missing the whole PowerPoint deal. I think that online PowerPoints would have great online educational purposes. For example, take the ZohoShow that I wrote about earlier. Record an audio lecture to go along with that online using something like Odeo, and embed the audio player underneath the Slideshow. You will then have an online lecture that appeals to audio, visual, and kinesthetic learners (they have to manually click to go the next slide).
One tool that I found interesting as I searched for an online PowerPoint solution was SlideShare. SlideShare is a tool that works like YouTube, but for PowerPoint presentations. In fact, the layout and functionality are pretty much the same. The difference with ZohoShow is that with Zoho, you can create and edit the PowerPoints online. SlideShare just allows you to upload and display completed PowerPoints. But it still works nice. And, it’s free.
ZohoShow and SlideShare both do not support animations or slide transition effects. The animations part is important to point out because, if you have something that appears in order on a slide – say, a series of pictures – that effect will be lost once you upload the presentation to either site. Especially those that like to bulleted list items appear one at a time. The way to get around this is to create one slide for each effect that you want to add (using PowerPoints copy and paste slide feature) and then upload it. Here is the same PowerPoint from my earlier post uploaded into SlideShare: