Reflections Slide Share

This week’s project was the most involved, the Slideshare presentation. Essentially Slideshare is an online presentation tool. It takes power points, PDFs and posts them in an online slideshow. My topic was copyright and the use of audiovisual materials in web-based education. I have created numerous PowerPoint presentations for classes I am taking and classes I am teaching, so the PowerPoint was not a problem. The biggest problem I had was finding the needed research materials. Many of the materials were obvious, U.S. Copyright website, law textbooks etc. I also managed to find several articles on EBSCO Host and using Lexis. While I did not actually incorporate the majority of the Lexis materials, reading them helped point me towards several things I was unaware of such as the TEACH Act. I think the presentation came out pretty well. I would like to have found more material that addressed the audio/visual materials specifically but I could extract that from the legislative jargon.

I think Sldieshare is wonderful for giving students power point lectures, whether it is the lecture in a web-based class or a posting of a lecture from a face-to-face class. I plan to post all of my presentations after giving them in class rather than depending on emailing them. Emailing them has always been a problem because the files are often too big and get rejected by the servers or students do not have PowerPoint and cannot view them. Even when I convert the files to compressed PDFs and email them, they are often still too big and some of my technologically illiterate students don’t know how to download Adobe reader. Slideshare will allow me to post the materials and not have students telling me they didn’t get the email. Now they will have no excuse!

I think the ‘comments’ section could be valuable as well. If students do not understand something on a particular slide, they could post questions. Either I could answer them or other students could if they think they can help. I think this will help facilitate student learning because it will be another means for them to share and interact with each other. I do wish that the hyperlinks in the presentations could work. I add many links to resources and they would certainly be helpful to the students. I suppose I could add the hyperlinks in the ‘comments’ section so that students could link from there. As a whole, this, like so many of the tools we have used this semester is something I really want to incorporate.

In looking at everyone else’s presentations, there was such a diverse range of topics! I have learned a lot from my fellow classmates and I think that that serves as an example for how useful Slideshare can be!