My Online Portfolio Presentation and Fun With Slideshare's Slidecasting

UPDATE--Since I posted this, I deleted the presentation from Slideshare as it was definitely a work in progress that is going to be replaced. I put the original presentation up for the practice and to get feedback and now it's no longer needed.  However, I wanted to leave this post here because it also includes  info on Slideshare and the slidecasting process I went through. After using it a second time, I can say that things went much more smoothly and that I highly recommend the Slidecasting feature.
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Friends, it's been a long day. Above you will find the fruits of my labor--a 14.5 minute Slidecast on Creating and Using Online Portfolios. 

Let me first tell you a little about the presentation, then I'll share my experience with using Slideshare to create a Slidecast of this baby.

The Presentation
I'm currently working on a project to introduce online portfolios to students at four different high schools. I did this particular presentation to start to get my thoughts in order, so this time around I'm doing it for a broader audience. In the next iteration, I'll need to change some things to adapt it for these students.   

This is my first stab at pulling things together and even as I'm writing this, I'm realizing many  things I want to change or add in. Like here's a big duh--I didn't define what a portfolio actually IS, until after I went through all the reasons to have one. Can you tell that I'm brain dead?

Anyway, let me know what you think, what questions I didn't answer, etc. And I definitely want feedback on how you think it should be changed for high school. Especially you edubloggers out there--hit me with your feedback.  Anything is helpful. Please share your thoughts.

Using Slidecasting
For those of you who could care less about online portfolios, you still may want to take a look just to see how Slidecasting works. Basically, it allows you to synch up an mp3 file with a Powerpoint Presentation so that visitors can not only SEE your slides, they can see how you set them to cool music or provided narration.

I'm not going to go into the step-by-step of things--they do a good job of that here, where they also include a Slidescast on how to create a Slidecast. I just want to comment on a few aspects of the process.

• I used Audacity to record my audio file and for whatever reason, it was a bear today. I've never had problems before (maybe it's my mic) and usually I highly recommend the software. But today it took me forever to get this recording, and the quality still isn't great. So no comments on that, please. It will have to be redone.

• Thanks to a tip from Slideshare, I discovered that I could upload my audio for FREE to the Internet Archive, in exchange for a Creative Commons license, which I would have granted anyway. That was a nice little surprise. Am I the only one who didn't know about this? I thought that, at $5 a month,  Hipcast was great, but the last time I checked, free still beats $5, so Hipcast may have to go.
  

• Slideshare's interface for Slidecasting is actually pretty intuitive and easy to use. Lots of dragging and dropping (which I like) and I was able to quickly find my way around the synchronizing.  I will tell you, though, that it takes a while to get the audio and slide synching timed properly and this thing still isn't perfect, which you know I prefer. For now, I'll blame myself and the fact that it's my first time. We'll see if it continues.

Overall, although it took me all day to put everything together, it was still not a bad process. Much of my trouble stemmed from Audacity and I was interrupted several times, too. If you're going to use a PowerPoint, particularly if it's something you'll be re-using, it's worth the time, I think.

Now, feel free to leave me feedback on the presentation. Also, let me know if you've made a Slidecast and how it turned out.

Comments

[Beth Kanter]

I love the content .. thank you. My experiment with slidecast bombed because I used camtasia powerpoint record. There's some little bug and I was too lazy or busy to fire up audacity -- maybe afraid it would be a pain.

http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2007/08/slideshare-adds.html

[Michele Martin]

Well, as it turns out, firing up Audacity was a pain for me, too! :-) I still think it's worth a try when you get the time. I'll definitely be looking at doing some more rounds of this as I can see a lot of potential for many projects I'm working on. For that matter--a slidecast would make a great online portfolio, in certain circumstances, now that I think about it. Just pull together some of your artifacts and then talk your way through!

[Cammy]

The slides looked great. The audio streamed poorly on my machine, so I jumped through the content. I'm not sure if the audio issues were on my end or yours (audacity).

[Michele Martin]

Thanks, Laura--I think I'm going to have to suck it up and redo the audio. I need to redo some things on the presentation anyway, so it was going to have to happen. Thanks for taking the time to take a look.