Presentation Tools For Language Teaching

Presentation Tools

Prezi     My Prezis

For a variety of how to present a slide show, Prezi is a good option.  You can import Powerpoints into Prezi but will need to reformat once in Prezi.  Here are my likes and dislikes about Prezi.

Likes

• web based, so you can easily access your Prezis online
• you can also view off-line, just need to make sure to save it for offline function
• sharing via different ways, such as email and online
• able to embed Prezis into your web page, grab the html and insert once you have turned on the html version of your web page or blog.  Embedding is not that hard, but you may need to practice a few times to get it right.
• you can make it private or public or share with those with a link
• presentation transitions are unique, watch your vertigo!
• new slides and changing of sequencing of slides is relatively easy.
• inserting images is easy.
• sub-slides are a very handy tool, sort of a footnote or smaller slide that goes to full screen size once engaged.
• automatically saves every few minutes
• it's free!
• Prezi can be used on most devices, but some are more limited in functions than others
• Embed Youtube videos

Dislikes (not many)

• not many, but the fact that Prezi does not hyperlink to text or images is annoying, you need to paste the whole link in TIP: shorten the link in Google or bitly or tinyurl

Google Slides

Like all Google products, Slides is very good.  Dovetails wonderfully with Blogger and if you are a Google fan with Blogger and sites, this is probably your go to presentation app.

Keynote

A great app that almost holds its own with Microsoft's Powerpoint.  Keynote is user friendly and the presentation can be controlled with your iPhone which is useful.

Powerpoint

Probably the benchmark for all presentation slide software.  Powerpoint is a favourite of mine and I imagine like many others, slide presentation skills were honed with PPT.  It is a powerful tool that can do it all, except its not a cloud based product, but that is not really a huge disadvantage except if you want to edit online.

Slideshare

Slideshare arguably houses the most amount of free, publically available slide presentations online.  Whatever topic you are after, it has probably been saved and shared in Slideshare.  
You can create slide presentations in Slideshare, but not on mobile devices.  

Emaze
Emaze is a new discovery for me.  I came across it from one of the people I follow on Twitter.  It's a clean, simple web based presentation tool and the free version can produce quite good slideshows.  There are enough functions to jazz it up a bit and you can share it and import from Powerpoint, which is what I did for this one.  If Prezi gives you vertigo, this is a good option.  I think the paid version is quite expensive, but if you like it and think its worthwhile, then go for it.