Week 4 - Tools for sharing presentations, documents and more

We’ve already explored tools that facilitate sharing website bookmarks and citations. This week we’ll be exploring tools that allow you to share presentations, documents and other files online.

Note for WTS users: You will not be able to hear any audio files if you are accessing the following resources via WTS. You may also experience difficulties playing videos on SlideShare and Prezi presentations may be jerky. If you’d like to use a computer where you will have full functionality you could go to a UCL cluster room with Myriad computers or come to the Royal Free Library where we’ll be happy to log you on to a computer.

SlideShare

SlideShare is perhaps the best known, and most widely used, website for sharing presentations, but it also allows you to share documents, PDFs and videos. Presentations can be accompanied by audio to make them ‘slidecasts’. You can add comments and tags to your own presentations and those by other people. SlideShare also allows you to download presentations and re-use or amend them, or simply use them as inspiration for your own presentations.

As with most Web 2.0 applications there is a free version and a premium version, which has more features. SlideShare Pro, for example, allows you to share your presentations privately as well as publicly.

Why might researchers or clinicians want to use SlideShare?

• To share presentations with anyone who might not get to see it otherwise, eg. for people unable to attend a conference. SlideShare presentations can easily be embedded into your blog, website, twitter or facebook.
• To share and disseminate ideas or reach a wider audience. This could include engaging with the public and on a massive scale.
• To invite comments and feedback and so get new ideas to develop their work or make their presentations better.
• To make international contacts and network with people with similar work interests.
• To download presentations that are relevant to them and re-use or re-mix them.

Prezi

Prezi provides a new and alternative approach to creating presentations. Instead of a linear progression from slide to slide, as you get in PowerPoint, with Prezi you work on a single canvas which you move around or zoom in and out, making for a more dynamic interpretation. It's a web-based package so you create your presentation online but can download it for use offline. For an idea as to what a Prezi presentation looks like, take a look at the presentation we did for this year's summer school session on competencies. (We're not claiming this is a perfect example of the capabilities of Prezi!)

Competencies on Prezi

Prezi is freely available, although you can pay for a premium version. With the standard version all slides are automatically made public so you need to take into account copyright rules if including images or screenshots in your presentation. This makes it more suited to some uses than others. eg. you need to be careful about copyrighted images.

As with SlideShare, Prezi presentations can be shared, downloaded and re-worked by others, you can post comments or upload audio files to accompany your presentation. You can also collaborate online with other authors to create a Prezi together, and you can download it and play it offline if you need to present on a computer with no Internet access.

Why might researchers or clinicians want to use Prezi?

Many of the reasons to do with sharing and disseminating presentations are similar to those for SlideShare. In addition Prezi provides an alternative format for presentations, and allows collaborative online working.

Thing 7: Try searching for presentations on SlideShare or Prezi that might be of interest to a researcher, academic, student or clinician in the fields of biomedicine or health (or a subject relevant to your role) to see what kind of presentations are out there.

Thing 8: Write a post on your blog about your experiences of using SlideShare and/or Prezi. You might want to consider some of the following points:

• How easy are they to use?
• Do you think they are a useful tool for the user groups we are considering?
• What might be the issues or concerns that people might have if making their presentations publicly available through these tools? Could plagiarism and the stealing of other people’s work be an issue? Are there any copyright issues? (You might want to explore the support or help sections on the websites for more information about copyright).
• Why not try linking to a presentation you find interesting, or even embedding it in your blog post? (see Optional Extras section below for instructions).

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Optional extras

SlideShare and Prezi
You could try creating your own accounts on SlideShare and/or Prezi, and try uploading or downloading a presentation, or creating one from scratch in Prezi. The Prezi manual has good instructions on getting started and the following presentation gives some great tips on creating a successful Prezi.

How to use prezi and WIN

View more presentations from Ned Potter

Tips: How to embed presentations in your blog or website

SlideShare and Prezi both allow you to copy and paste HTML code for a presentation into a blog or website. In Blogger you need to view the post in the Edit HTML screen rather than the Compose screen when pasting the code.

• SlideShare: From the page for a presentation in SlideShare, click on the Embed link above the slides. Copy the HTML code. Paste this code into your blog post.
• Prezi: Click on the Share link below a Prezi and then click on Embed. The HTML code is displayed – click on Copy code to clipboard. Then paste this code into your blog post.

Other tools for sharing presentations, documents and more:
SlideShare and Prezi are not the only tools for sharing presentations. Lesser known examples include:

• Slide Boom allows you to upload presentations, which can be converted to flash retaining audio and video. Like SlideShare you can search for other presentations and post comments etc.
• Scribd.com claims to be the world’s largest social reading and publishing company. It allows you to share PDF, Word and PowerPoint files.
• Screencast.com is designed for business or academic professionals to share multimedia content via the Web.

Did you know?
There are various projects and initiatives set up to help facilitate the sharing of educational resources online, not just presentations but any teaching and learning materials that you can use or re-use for free. These are known as Open Education Resources (OER). If you’re interested, why not explore the following links:

• OER Commons: Database that allows you to search, browse, evaluate, or discuss over 30,000 high-quality OERs already available on the Web.
• The Higher Education Academy and JISC are working in partnership on a HEFCE funded Open Educational Resources Programme whereby it has been funding various UK OER initiatives, including:
  - PORSCHE (Pathways for Open Resource Sharing through Convergence in Healthcare Education), which is exploring ways of sharing healthcare related OERs across the NHS and HE
  - ACTOR (Accredited Clinical Teaching Open Resources) project, which is seeking to increase the sharing, repurposing and utilisation of educational development resources for PG Certificate clinical education programmes.
  - OER Digital Humanities project, based at UCL.