SlideShare

In retrospect, it probably would have made a little more sense if I had reviewed SlideShare before I reviewed Empressr. You will see why . . .

SlideShare - found here at http://www.slideshare.net/ - is a free web application that transforms MS PowerPoint files into actual viewable, website-friendly presentations. The web-friendly presentations that SlideShare produces look and behave exactly how the PowerPoint presentations look and feel when they are viewed with MS Office. However, with SlideShare, your users will not have to download a PowerPoint file, then open it with their own local version of MS Office to view it. SlideShare will enable your users to view and control your MS PowerPoint presentation right on your website.

To put very simply, SideShare is like YouTube for PowerPoint.

Here is an example of how ShideShare presentation looks when embedded on your teacher pages, social media site, or blog:

SlideShare Quick Tour - Summary of features & capabilities

View more presentations from Amit Ranjan.

Upside: Teachers can use all of the rich media features offered through MS PowerPoint to relay their lessons and lectures with creativity and personality without having to worry about whether their students are able to readily and easily view these presentations from their preferred computers. With SlideShare, MS PowerPoint presentations can be accessed with a web browser an an Internet connection. Students will not have to download any files or have any special software. SlideShare makes PowerPoint so much more useful and valuable.

In addition, SlideShare, as a website, offers a great repository of education-based SlideShare presentations that were previously created shared by generous users. You can find presentations on geography, algebra, the physics of time travel, and most any academic subject. This could be a great resource for teachers who do not know how to use MS PowerPoint to create their own SlideShares, or simply for teachers who lack the time to create similar presentations themselves. The link that you can use to search through the previously uploaded presentations is found below:

http://www.slideshare.net/category/education

Downside: For displaying PowerPoint-like presentations online, Empressr is really a superior application in that it conatins an amazing interface for actually creating these presenations, as well as the ability to add alternate forms of rich media (including video). In addition, the final results produced by Empressr look much better than the presentations produced by SlideShare (scroll down and see my review of Empressr for a comparison). Since you can also simply upload MS PowerPoint files to Empressr just as you would SlideShare, you might as well use Empressr.