Tuesday, March 13, 2007

May I Have Your Presentation?

I decided to treat myself today to a magazine - a MacWorld Magazine at that. There was a great article in there about presentations. It started asking if you've even just given a presentation and someone ask if they could have a copy of it. They go on by saying it's not your slides they want (ahem - yes it is), it's your whole presentation with you speaking. They go on to point out that unless you actually videotape the presentation, they are out of luck.
So they give you the tip of buying a piece of software called ProfCast 2.0. The prices isn't bad, it's $30. Basically you audio tape your presentation and drag the presentation over (Keynote or PowerPoint). It will also work with GarageBand.
Wait, do not go out and spend $30 for this! Go shopping or out to the movies instead with the money you would have spent. Instead, try this trick.
Next time you teach a great lesson, open up GarageBand, Audacity, or even have your mic ready on your iPod to record your audio. Then save the PowerPoint as JPEG. You now can either bring the photos of the slides into the GarageBand and create an enhanced podcast or you can use iMovie or MovieMaker. Or better yet - are you going to practice the presentation first? Bring the photos into PhotoStory and record the audio for each slide. Poof- there is your electronic presentation and you didn't spend $30.
As a teacher - I could do this with all my PowerPoints and then let students check them out for review, missed classes, or whatever diabolical - I mean educational - reason they come up with. As a presenter - I have a back up of the presentation and can even do my own personal critique on the whole thing.
Pretty cool huh?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Danielle, I think you missed the point of ProfCast. ProfCast records the audio & slide timings LIVE, as you give the presentation. It synchs the images to the audio for you! That way you don't have to listen to it again as you manually drag images to synch them with the audio. You can use GarageBand to edit your recording, but you don't need to. ProfCast can publish the whole thing in a matter of minutes, without editing.

It's designed to save educators valuable time!

Oh, and we do provide academic discounts for educators.

David Chmura
Chief Instigator, Humble Daisy, Inc
Makers of ProfCast