I thought this week of assessment and hardware/software evaluations was good. We had to also complete our Pecha Kucha presentation and I honestly say that this has been difficult for me. I can't seem to get the slides to auto advance while I record into VoiceThread. Since I am leaving a comment, VT believes I am leaving a comment for just that one slide and will not advance until I am done. I find it difficult to advance the slide myself after exactly 20 seconds so I am trying to rely on the automatic advance, which of course isn't working for me. Hopefully I will get this soon.
The evaluation of software was interesting, but I believe we may have evaluated a few of these programs in another class. Even though I didn't get the same thing as last time (which would have been bad), I still found that Author Stream was a solid program. Group 1 has three online presentation programs that compete against PowerPoint.
I can see trying out a few of these online options with my students, however because they are online and our network is undergoing some renovations, I may wait until our network is a bit more reliable until moving to an entirely online option. I will have to explore more of these options to make an informed decision on which one would be best for my students. There are so many options out there and we all want the program to do everything that PowerPoint can do and more. Isn't it funny how some of us will compare things to PowerPoint, even when there are better programs to use?
Josh - I also struggled with getting Voicethread to work with timing out the slides & advancing at the end of the 20 seconds, etc so I actually did my Pecha Kucha in Windows Movie Maker. I was able to set up the slide duration prior to importing the pictures & then went from there. After creating the movie I uploaded it to YouTube so I could them share it via the web with Louis & the rest of the cohort.
ReplyDeleteJosh,
ReplyDeleteI, too, remember looking at some of these same programs before and offering an evaluation. In particular, 280 slides comes to mind. I used quite a few of the features that powerpoint does not offer after uploading a powerpoint to it. For instance, the user is allowed to change the opacity of the images in 280 slides. This is where I got my idea of "subliminal messages" some weeks back. As to your comment on powerpoint being the standard to which others are compared, I believe it is because powerpoint is ubiquitous and therefore everyone knows and has tried it. But that will change when the word gets out about these better programs.