Creating Presentations

Week 8 - Creating Presentations

This week's expert is Courtney Fuson

Whether you're trying to teach students how to use the library, impress colleagues with the latest thing you've learned in Learn & Discover, convince the library board not to cut the teen programs, or make a conference presentation,chances are, you're going to turn to PowerPoint.

We've all suffered through bad presentations, with and without PowerPoint's help. There are lots of places you can go to get tips on how to improve your presentations, but Presentation Zen is one of the best. If you want to learn the Lessig Method, the Godin Method, the Kawasaki Method, or the Takahashi Method, Presentation Zen is the place to go.

What if you find out that you have a presentation due in a week, but you're not going to be at your normal computer for a lot of that week? What do you do? Susan Jennings talked about both Google Docs and Zoho in Week 4: Google Docs and Friends. Both Google Docs and Zoho have a presentation creating tool that looks and works a lot like PowerPoint.

But what if you want to do something different? There are a couple of options that you can use.

One is called Animoto. Animoto will take your images, videos, music and text and turns them into a video. Free accoutns are limited to 30-second videos, but educators and non-profits can apply for a free pro account.

Animoto will let you upload photos and videos from your computer, or it can connect to Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, Smugmug, or Photobucket to retrieve pictures you've stored there.

You can add text, but there is a limit on how long the text can be. Be creative!

You can also add your own music, or choose from the wide variety of music they offer.

Click on the Create button, and the video is processed! Animoto videos can be viewed on the Animoto site, through the iPhone app, shared on a number of social networking sites, or you can download them and post them wherever you like!

Another option for presenting without PowerPoint is called Prezi. Prezi creates presentations in a style completely unlike PowerPoint. It allows you to zoom, move in various ways and transition from idea to idea in a completely new way.

For a better explanation, visit Prezi.com and view the promotional video, or go through the tutorials.

If you're looking for inspiration for a presentation, the two most popular places to share PowerPoint presentations are SlideFinder and Slideshare. Both of these sites allow you to view and download other presentations. Always be sure to give proper attribution if you us someone else's work, of course! Slidefinder and Slideshare are also great places to learn about new things, since you can watch lots of different presentations on all sorts of topics.

This weeks activity: Check out Animoto or Prezi and create a presentation. Post the link to your presentation in the forum so that we can all check it out. Also, let us know what you thought, and whether or not you like Animoto and/or Prezi better than PowerPoint.