Presented at the eTech Ohio 2008 conference by Alvin Trusty and hosted on TeacherTube (www.teachertube.com).

A very good PowerPoint presentation which manages to make the subject of copyright actually interesting. Half of the talk focus’s on copyright while the other considers how you can create a good PowerPoint presentation. Basically he discusses a particular copyright topic on the slide then briefly shows how he created the visual effects on that slide before moving on to the next copyright topic.

There’s some good stuff here about copyright. Including the issues of putting videos on to YouTube under the Fair Use terms (the bit about the NFL vs. a Professor of Law is amusing and enlightening). Other laws affecting copyright are also looked at including the Teach Act 2001, Time Shifting, Space Shifting, Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Creative Commons. Excepting Creative Commons some of theses acts are obviously US centric but I don’t they have international equivalents.

There’s also some pointers to useful resources. For example Flickr (www.flickr.com) hosts images released under Creative Commons. In fact if go to www.flickr.com/creativecommons you can see there are 63 million images you can use without having to contacting the author (but you must citate them – always remember that).

DISCLOSURE: however I’m not a lawyer so please don’t quote me on any of the above.

With regards to designing presentations advice is given on creating simple animations and removing bullet points. He also states that you should avoid reading out your slides as the audience often read faster than you do and reach the end of the slide before you do. So you might as well send the audience the slideshow and not turn up. This is an obvious point but so many speakers are guilty of this, myself included when I have had to little time to practice.

Viewing the presentation I released that many of the slides had very little text and most were images. And as such they sat very well with the speakers voice (recorded at the session). It made me realise that a truly effective PowerPoint slide, if it is really doing it’s job in terms of enabling the speaker to get the points across, should be incapable of acting as stand alone resource, that is without the speaker’s voice.

Download Video: Posted by proftrusty at TeacherTube.com.

Taken from the blog of Dan Meyer. He posted this starting a 1 week contest with readers submitting using the comment facility.

This is quite interesting and I wonder if it could be extended to other uses, e.g. describe a module, class outcomes, group activities – all using 4 slides.

I’m going to have a crack at this myself, (furthermore i WONT use bullet points). If it’s not here by this time next week feel free to insult me.

[slideshare id=85551&doc=death-by-powerpoint4344&w=425]

Also I found this via SlideShare which is kind of a YouTube service which allows you to upload your presentations and share them with the outside world for comment and feedback (and in this case embedding into blogs).

All uploaded slides are tagged with keywords and so you can search for specific subjects. I typed in ‘education’ and the service returned 4521 presentations!

Now for the record I’m not a huge fan of slides since a good and well designed slide show should be so integrated with the speaker such that on its own its meaning will be diminished. And neither am I advocating for staff to use the service (it breaks University copyright to do so). However it is a very good resource for sourcing presentations on given subjects. This is because, as per YouTube videos, uploaded presentations are tagged with keywords. You can then enter specific terms in the SlideShare search box and this will pull out slides which match the terms. Try ‘education’ for instance.

And despite my earlier comment some of the slideshows are very good.

Oh and another nice feature is that you can upload the slide notes as well.

The presentation below is by David Warlick on the issues surrounding preparing students for the future work place (and as to how that workplace is an unknown).

View SlideShare

[slideshare id=56542&doc=flat-world-flat-web-flat-classrooms-25003&w=425]

I’ve embedded a couple of the examples below (via SlideShare – kind of a version of ‘YouTube’ but for slide presentations rather than video).

[slideshare id=54123&doc=creative-web-20-learning-5570&w=425]

[slideshare id=60448&doc=microblogging-tiny-social-objects-on-the-future-of-participatory-media-2898&w=425]

Life After Death by PowerPoint