Presentations can be made using tools like Keynote, PowerPoint, S5, SlideRocket, Prezi, SlideShare, videos, or other presentation methods, though they must be housed online. >>>
I published three recent presentations composed in PowerPoint on SlideShare, http://www.slideshare.net/kendalljoy.
I didn’t actually learned to use PowerPoint until college when I was taking American Sign Language classes. Presentations required visuals and no text, so I acclimated to PowerPoint’s interface by deleting the text boxes from blank slides and putting only images in. It was a great way for me to learn, by experimenting with a limited, immediate task. Incorporating PowerPoint slides into conference presentations required me to learn a bit more about using themes and templates. In the examples I posted to SlideShare, I kept the same theme and varied the colors–I had an idea of creating a cohesive look and feel. This probably won’t hold up forever but I’ll probably keep trying it until I run out of colors or need to adapt the theme to a different subject.
To find images for these presentations, I often go in for a book cover to accompany a quote I’m going to read and want my audience to be able to reflect on. This actually became a really useful practice in my “Butch(er)ing Subjectivity” presentation, when I compared the original and re-released covers of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (and its subtitle: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity). When I need a specific image, I’ll generally take it from anywhere I can find it through Google Image Search. But when I need an abstract image, I try to prefer the Creative Commons Search to find something I can reuse (or even modify) with permission.
When gathering these presentations together for my Certificate submission, I checked our S5, SlideRocket, and SlideShare, and decided to post my presentations on SlideShare, since it seems like the most social of these tools. S5 makes a standardized PowerPoint-like presentation tools available through the web. SlideRocket looked a lot like another proprietary slide tool online. But SlideShare allows you to follow other users, comment on published slides, and it keep tracks of stats like views, embeds, and downloads. SlideShare also generates a “transcript” from the text on slides, although in PowerPoints where I had notes (the text of my talks meant to accompany each slide), the notes disappeared.
Bonus: for this badge I also started to learn Prezi, using the poster I made for Productivity and Digital Workflow. See my draft here. Loading the whole poster into Prezi was kind of weird, because essentially it made the entire thing an object. I had to watch a few tutorial videos to learn how to draw frames (which replace the metaphor of “slides”) and practice ordering them into a simple path. Not a great Prezi but a good start for learning the mechanics.
2nd bonus: Admiring Will Burdette‘s use of tumblrs as a kind of commonplace book for dissertation chapters, I put one together for a conference paper on sweat, testosterone, and masculinity: testo-sweat.tumblr.com. Then, after writing the paper, I went through it backwards and added posts to my tumblr in reverse order so that I could use the tumblr as a presentation tool.