2 Great Online Presentation Tools for E-Learning

These two widely used presentation applications are accessible from any web browser.

Guest post by Mark Davies.

If you want to present a lecture without too many words, then your best bet is to prepare a presentation and let your slides talk for themselves. This makes presentations a convenient tool for teaching online courses. There are quite a few Web 2.0 presentation creation tools available, but the best free options to consider are Prezi and SlideShare, both of which are briefly reviewed below.

Prezi

• It’s an unconventional presentation design application because you don’t have to create individual slides
• You have a workspace where you can create non-linear presentations which you can navigate with the help of pointers – a map shows you how to move around the presentation.
• The user interface is intuitive and easier to understand the more you use it.
• It’s great for creating unconventional, interesting and visually appealing presentations.
• It’s designed in Flash, which explains the visual brilliance.
• It comes in both free and paid versions – if you don’t want to shell out money, the free package comes with 100 MB of storage space and a player that allows you to view your presentations offline. However, you cannot create presentations offline, and all your presentations are stamped with the Prezi logo and published publicly in the showcase. There are other plans that have more features and which you have to buy, so if you’re a serious user, you can try the Enjoy plan or the Pro package.
• It’s initially a little difficult to use, but there are many video demos that help you find your way, and once you get the hang of it, Prezi is a great tool for designing presentations online.

SlideShare

• It’s more of a presentation sharing tool than one that helps in creating them.
• It allows you to upload and host your presentations in common formats like Microsoft PowerPoint or OpenOffice on an online community.
• The user interface is simply designed and easy to use.
• It converts all presentations to the Flash format. However, this is a time consuming process, so with a slow connection, you could end up spending quite a few hours waiting for your presentations to upload.
• A big advantage of SlideShare is that you don’t need to have PowerPoint or any other software installed to view the presentations online (because they’re converted into the Flash format).
• The Flash format also allows you to embed these presentations in your blog or on your website.
• You can restrict viewing privileges and control who sees your online presentations.
• SlideShare allows you to view your presentations in the full-screen mode.
• It’s completely free to use.

As you can see from the above points, Prezi is good for professional users while SlideShare works well for those who’re just experimenting with online presentation design tools and looking for ways to share them online.

This guest post is contributed by Mark Davies, he writes on the topic of Online Masters Degree . He welcomes your comments at his email id: markdavies247@gmail.com.

Related Posts (if the above topic is of interest, you might want to check these out):
Vuvox Rocks (what a great tool for creating student reports and teacher presentations)
Comparing 12 Free Screencasting Tools
Creating brief instructional videos (and more) with Jing