Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Presentation Tools

These are the tools that we all use to present seminar and conference papers or to gather and present the ideas of a group.

Slideshow tools

PowerPoint: You will be familiar, I am sure, with PowerPoint – the tool found on almost all corporate computers and one of the most widely used presentation tools in the world. PowerPoint is packed with features and supports a wide range of file embedding and compression options. It’s an oldie, but a goodie.

Keynote: Keynote is the Apple alternative to PowerPoint, and works in much the same way. It works better than PowerPoint with Apple’s mobile devices, but that’s to be expected.

Beamer: For LaTeX users – engineers, scientists, and programmers – Beamer could be a useful alternative to PowerPoint and Keynote. For those of us more used to WYSIWIG editors, Beamer looks like a nightmare.

Canvas tools

Prezi: Prezi hasn’t been around for long, but has already gathered a strong following. With Prezi, the author dots various bits of information around a canvas, and then builds links and transition effects, creating a presentation that doesn’t have to be as linear as the slide show presentations. It allows the presenter to zoom in and out, depending on whether she is talking about the overall picture, or a detail within the picture.

Popplet: Popplet is a digital pinboard, onto which the author “pins” “popples” – containers for digital material. It provides a very nice interface that provides for collaboration and allows users to collect, bookmark and organize ideas, information, websites, and various bits of media.

Wallwisher: Wallwisher is an online noticeboard. Users post their ideas on digital sticky notes.

Mindmapping tools

Mindmapping or concept mapping tools can be used for presentations too. The author creates a mindmap, using one of the many tools about, collapses it, and opens each node as he or she begins to speak, thereby building up the map. Try one of the following tools – MindMeister, MindJet MindManager, XMind, FreeMind, iMindMap, ConceptDraw MindWave or Spinscape.

 

1 comment:

  1. For Slideshows I use HTML Slidy. This is some code you add to a web page to turn it into slides. The advantage is that the slides and notes are in one document, are a very small file and will work on tablet computers and smart phones.

    USQ's ICE system had a similar slide generating function built into their course notes editing system, but I am not sure it is still supported.

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