Teach [+] Tech [=] Nexus

Here is a Web 2.0 application that might thrill you, visit SlideShare to experience "the world's largest community for sharing presentations on the web". This is for presentations what YouTube is for videos. The site accepts Powerpoint, OpenOffice and Keynote presentations as ppt, pps, pdf and odp formatted files. At this time, presentations with transitions, audio or video are not supported. Other upload option include by URL, by email and through browser plug-ins. Membership is free if you provide an email account.

Anyone can search for presentations on any topic. Members can upload, comment, tag, post on a blog or share presentations. Some authors allow the downloading of presentation source files (TurnItIn - watch out!). Once you find an author that shares your interests, you can add them to your Contacts for easy review of their presentations. Why not use RSS to automatically keep up with an author, a tag or "most viewed."

Reading the FAQ, I am shocked that they consider a 30 MB presentation OK. On campus, I would be working with faculty to significantly trim down that file size before posting to our web servers due to download time and bandwidth concerns.

Have you attended a conference lately? Maybe the presentations were uploaded here!

What does this community of presenters change textbook publishing?

Remember our convocation speaker, and her very visual (less text) presentation. "Death By Powerpoint" by Alexei Kapterev is an important reminder of the appropriate use of technology shared on this blog post from SlideShare.

Mai Gemu Johnonn (Mathematics) invited me to share how students can search for audio podcast lectures for the classes they are taking at SCC. Well, we will discover many podcasts and not many originate at Sac City. Our destinations will include UC Berkeley, MIT, Stanford, Texas A & M, Duke and many more.

Through iTunesU, Mai Gemu's students will see "campus life" in the lectures and events covered at these colleges and universities.

Why don't you explore podcasts and iTunesU by downloading iTunes from http://apple.com/itunes. This application is FREE and available for Windows and Macintosh computers.

iTunes will play podcasts on your computer, a mobile MP3 player is optional. Some podcasts are enhanced and you will see video, text notes or Acrobat documents attached to the episode.

Our campus site license for Respondus (test generating software - Windows) renews each summer – the info page I maintain includes a link to the download page from
Instructional Development .. http://web.scc.losrios.edu/instrdev/respondus/handouts

The Respondus Download page is at http://it.scc.losrios.edu/Secure/Respondus/Respondus.htm and it requires you to type in your email account and network passphrase (the new one!)

Please share this message with other staff/faculty as needed.

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