Online Presentation

As an experiment in using the technology, I decided to put our symposium presentation online. I had to record the sound track anew and I am afraid that the quality is not very good. If I ever have time I will try to tidy it up. The original presentation was done using PowerPoint 97 and there are various ways in which it can be put on the web. The most straighforward is to use the "Save-As HTML" feature. This has two options, the simpliest just puts the images and notes (if any) into HTML format, while the more sophisticated one uses an ActiveX control to include the narration. Obviously the latter is preferable, however, it requires the user to download the control (in Internet Explorer this is automatic, but other browsers require a little bit of work!) There is also a slight problem in that the audio is stored as WAV files which must be downloaded completely before they can be played. Since they might be very large, this can take considerable time. A better option is thus to use streaming media. Microsoft have just provided a free add-on to PowerPoint which performs the conversion to this format automatically too. They have also introduced a new version of their NetShow media player which provides some nice facilities for supplying educational media over the net.

Below you can find examples of our symposium presentation in each of these forms to compare them for yourself.

Virtually There: The Internet in Support of Learning

Using simple images and text (coming soon!}
Using PowerPoint Animator (ActiveX control) (coming soon!}
Using NetShow
Note: There are various ways to set this up. I currently use the simpliest option where the entire presentation is in one file streamed from a normal http server, not a special NetShow one. For this reason it is not possible to jump back and forth within the presentation. I could (and may well when time permits) split the presentation into smaller, possibly sound only, chunks and allow those the be selected directly. In this way, we can continue to use a normal server, but viewers can directly jump anywhere within the presentation. This is actually the default assuming you use the PowerPoint narration feature.
You will need the Windows Media Player to view this.
Click the image to download it for free!