slideshare: what’s not to love?

I am due for another teaching with technology post. This post is on slideshare, a social networking tool for uploading and sharing your presentations. There is a lot to like about slideshare and not much to dislike. Here is my list of likes:

1. It’s easy to give slideshare a test run. You can log in with your Facebook account without having to really “commit” to an account. You can fully customize your account and control privacy. If you set up a slideshare account with your Facebook login, then your Facebook photo will be your slideshare photo. That can be changed easily. I have one login for both social networking sites, but the information that each uses is different.
2. You can upload your presentations once to share them with many colleagues and viewers. You can allow viewers to download your slides (or not).  Likewise, you can designate some slides as “private.”
3. You can embed slides into blog posts or other html code. See my posts here and here. This way, viewers do not have to visit another site to view slides.
4. I cannot say enough about the slidecasts. Here, one can upload the mp3 file for a presentation and sync the presentation to the slides for an easy to make webinar. I have only done this once for my slides on financial advice. This was incredibly simple to do, and it truly makes the slides come alive. In retrospect, I wish I had recorded all of my presentations.
5. Slideshare keeps good statistics. I know exactly how many times someone has viewed each presentation, either through slideshare or through a blog post.
6. People find my slides without me having to advertise them. Granted it helps if I advertise my slides, but 107 people have viewed my slides on technical writing tips presumably through google searches and word of mouth.

I haven’t used slideshare frequently for my teaching in the classroom.In the future, I may require students to maintain presentations for a course on slideshare.

I do use slideshare for teaching outside of the classroom. I shared three presentations that I gave in seminars to a broad audience (on finances, technical writing, and applying to graduate school). I use slideshare to share these slides with students who did not attend the seminar but who may be interested. People seem to find the presentations using google.

I put several of my INFORMS talks on slideshare (see these slides about blogging for operations research) and shared them on twitter using the conference hashtag (#informs2011 this year). That way, other people attending the conference could easily find my slides. I noticed a sharp increase in my presentation feed hits after sharing via twitter.

My slideshare presentations are here.

Related posts on teaching with technology:

• Dropbox
• Kindles
• Delicious
• blogging in the classroom