Presentation tools

At the Naace All Members Conference (AMAC) recently I used a blog as my presentation tool, working back chronologically through my posts in the way that a flip chart would be used on an interactive whiteboard or the way slides could be used on PowerPoint. I use blogs for this purpose because I find it easy to embed videos and links into the posts and I can pass the information to people simply by giving them the URL which they can access anywhere they find a decent connection.

I felt that one of the advantages of using the blog was that people who wished to could post comments quickly and easily and this could be incorporated into the presentation. It hasn't proved to be as successful as I had wished in this regard at the moment. The ethos of 'commenting' or 'continuing discussion' or 'offering more/further ideas' does not yet seem to be part of our conference culture and so the presentation ends with ... well, the presentation. This is a pity as presentations at such conferences ought to be challenging enough to provoke further insights.

As a progression from this I have been excited by the way presenters at the K12Online Conference have used wikis as their preferred tool. A good example of this is found in Anne Davis's presentation “Learn to Blog: Blog to Learn”

I haven't tried this yet but certainly will, though I am, as yet, unsure how this will further my aim of gleaning comments and questions. Simply editing the wiki surely is not the answer and Anne's engaging presentation appears to use the wiki as a carrier of links to other wiki pages or even blogs ( WebQuest being one of these). Perhaps I am missing something really obvious here. Or does it matter at all ? The main thing is -does the compilation (is it a 'mash up') carry the message ? ... and for me it certainly does.

This takes me on to an interesting article that will fire off another set of ideas as we move into Web 2.1 and beyond. Dr Jason Ohler from Alaska has an interesting take on this (Naace Sharing Success).