Slideshare and Slidecasts

Jeez - don't want to harp on and sound like a broken record, but voice recording sometimes feels unreasonably difficult.

I have recently uploaded a PowerPoint presentation to SlideShare. This is a pretty good site and have been directed to it many times by some of my favourite bloggers who are sharing their presentations from conferences with those who could not attend. Pretty awesome considering that I doubt very much in this current economic climate that work will come at sending me to the US for a conference.

I didn't even realise that I already had an account with them. Actually, truth be told, I really can't remember with who on the Internets I have an account. *shrug* I guess that is a different topic for a different post. :)

So, on to SlideShare. Uploading my pptx was a bit time consuming. In part because I fiddled around with the presentation 3 times trying to 'prettify' it (people could be looking at it y'know), and the other part is that the site converts the file in some way which takes a little bit of time.

I recorded my narration a day or so later - and this, THIS is where the troubles began. I watched the SlideCast on how to create a SlideCast, and it seemed fairly straight forward. Since that was recorded SlideShare have upgraded their site and now have the capacity to host the audio file for you to synch with the slide. 

I uploaded the file, nothing happened, tried again, nothing happened - tried a few more times. Don't know who sang this song but this encapsulates what I was doing perfectly.

Definition Of Madness

One definition of madness is 
Doing the same thing over and over 
For ever and ever 
Expecting a different result 

I tried linking from the Internet Archive - nothing. Went through the help forums and followed their suggestions, which boiled down to something along the lines of 'there is a known problem with IE, try another browser'. So I used IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Google Chrome. I also tried three different computers running two different OS's. I think I had a reasonable go at it. I've even logged a job with SlideShare.

So please, please tell if you get sound synched with your slide. I want to know how you did it. I don't like being defeated.

Apart from that rant, SlideShare is a good site. Many excellent presentations there, and it is of course a way to share your presentations and possibly get them used by other parties. Students might be encouraged to create slides that are informative and viewable - taking a bit of pride and care in their work (I was using the features in PowerPoint where I could input values for the size and position of the text boxes to get them in same position in for each slide - for a seamless look). For any teachers without an LMS like Moodle, it is a good way to share slides with students who may want them for reference and study purposes.

Anyway, if you want to go and have a look at my presentation, click here for the link.