SLIDESHARE
Communicating with
Digital Media

Address: http://slideshare.net

Slideshare’s tag line is “Present Yourself” which sums up what this site is about. You can upload your PowerPoint presentations, Word document and Adobe PDG files to share publicly or privately.

File formats that are supported are ppt, pps, pot, pptx, ppsx, potx, OpenOffice, and Keynote. Document formats supported are PDF, Microsoft Word, Excel sheets, OpenOffice files and text files. The maxmum allowed file size is 100 MB.

One downside is that the site does not support audio and videos embedded inside presentations and slide transitions and animations.

You can also search for slideshows on topics of interest. Many, although not all, presentations can be downloaded. Transcripts are included with many of them.

Take a tour – “Why You Should Use SlideShare.”

21st Century Skills

Students can use this site to communicate with different audiences using digital media and environments. The site allows students to share their work, view other students’ work and make comments.

In the Classroom

First, the site is a treasure chest of resources for teachers to use. Presentations on many different topics can be found using the site’s search feature. This PPT “Planet Earth" could be used as an introduction to a science unit on biomes.

The site has a widget called Playlist that creates a customized list of your uploaded presentations or other presentations that you have in your Favorites list. The playlist can be embedded on a blog or wiki.

This playlist centers around the book Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett and is being shared with elementary teachers and librarians. The playlist includes a cyberlesson based on the book and related presentations about weather found on SlideShare.

During a unit project for a Web 2.0 course a high school teacher taught students how to upload PowerPoint presentations to SlideShare. Students emailed the published URL for their slideshows to the teacher and the posted the URL to a school discussion forum. See the teacher’s PowerPoint presentation for this project at “Introduction to SlideShare” – a Unit Project for a Web 2.0 course.


Students’ PowerPoint presentations can be uploaded and then embedded into class/school blogs, wikis and other web sites.

Older students can search the site for slideshows about a curriculum topic, design a wiki for a class project on the topic and embed the slideshows they found in the wiki. See below for Safety Concerns.

Tutorial

Here is a good tutorial that includes information about the site’s features - Communities and Groups - that educators can use to locate classroom resources:

”Slideshare for Teachers.”

Safety Concerns

There may be inappropriate slideshows for school on the site so be careful about just turning students loose to search the site. Remind older students that all searches should be focused on the assigned topic, just as is done when using a search engine, such as Google, to search for a topic.

Remind students not to identify themselves with their full first and last names or any other personal information when posting their work online.

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