Online presentations?

[pink_princess1uk]

Hiya everyone

I'm not planning to attempt this myself because I will be using a web designer to creat my site when I'm ready to commission it. I'm just wondering about the possbilities of incorporating online powerpoint presentations into a website for educational purposes. Is this possible? Is it difficult? What are thoughts about online presentations- for educational purposes? Is it expensive in terms of hosting etc? I'm not computer genius but any pointers from you guys would be helpful to see if this idea could be developed. TIA

[Rob Holmes]

Flash might be easier if you want the user to view it online on the site :)

Rob

[dan_moore]

There's nothing to stop you technically from including powerpoint presentations on a website.

However the fact you hardly ever see them on other sites should suggest that it is not an ideal format to use on the web.

For starters anyone without Powerpoint - a sizeable percentage of home users - won't be able to view the presentations.

They also tend to be quite large files, and of course none of the content will get indexed by search engines.

Your best bet is to look at how to take the information from the slides and present them clearly on the screen as HTML to reach the widest possible audience.

Cheers

Dan

[Cornish Steve]

What exactly do you mean by "educational purposes"? Is this information you want to make available for free that cannot be expressed in other formats, or are these slides part of a training course that you plan to offer via your site?

[pink_princess1uk]

Thanks for the replies. As an example of what I mean..lets say I wanted to teach you yoga (I don't btw!). You are a paying member of my site and have a password to access that section. Rather than have loads of pages full of information there are some powerpoint presentations that you can watch and run through at your own pace. These wouldn't show up full screen but be in a frame on the web page. Is that possible? Would you need PowerPoint on your comp to run the slides or could you have a plugin? As you might have guessed I have no idea what I'm talking about! :(

[Coding Monkey]

PowerPoint, as far as I'm aware, is not browser based, and you would have to download it onto your computer in order to view it. However, I'm sure you can export PowerPoint presentations into Flash or Quicktime, which can then be viewed via the browser - I know you can using Apple's equivalent of Keynote.

[Rob Holmes]

Pink we use a product that captures whatever window on your screen you want and allows you to add narration etc..

Then it converts it to Flash and hey presto the equivalent of a powerpoint presentation, with narration and online.

Failing that - use flash and get a designer to converty the powerpoint into a flash presentation.

Give me a shout if you want a quote ;)

Rob

[Tazuk]

I would agree that flash would have more interactivity and you could also include animation that would explain specific learning outcomes.

Tony

[Stephen]

Take a look an www.openoffice.org - it's a free office suite, and includes an equivalent of PowerPoint that can export to Flash. Pretty sweet.

[toystoyou]

Or you could set up a video podcast which is apparently the way of the future especially in seo terms.
I don't know how you do it, I found some information on seo online and they claim that the way forward will be podcasts. The large companies have already started offering downloadable podcasts.
I guess if it's a video podcast which is downloadable (you can charge or make it free) you could create your own video rather than rely on pages full of words?
But as I said I have no idea how do actually do it :?

[clairemackaness]

I have one on my site here http://www.clairemackaness.co.uk/Other%20pages/corporateart.htm but it's very slow to load up

[pink_princess1uk]

Thanks so much everyone. I will chase up a few of those ideas. You've been so much help! I will keep you posted! :D

[pink_princess1uk]

Having thought about this a little more I have had another thought- inspired by a business card shaped cd that came through the post today. The cd is manufactured by a company called www.mediaheaven.co.uk- although I'm sure there must be many other companies that produce similar products. I was thinking that maybe instead of providing online presentations- the member could get sent a cd on which is incorporated some flash presentations so they don't necessarily need to have PowerPoint installed. Does that sound like a better idea? TIA