Voice enabled online presentations using Bubbleshare
I am always on the look out for easy to use apps that students can use to create and publish narrated presentations/slideshows to use in online courses. I recently come across a good one. It’s called Bubbleshare and though it wasn’t designed with this in mind, turns out to be a very powerful online slideshow (presentation) builder.
Currently online students have been developing narrated powerpoints using the built in narration feature that is part of PowerPoint. The problem with this is that the resulting file size is huge, and without students being able to compress and publish to the web themseleves, the whole process becomes burdensome: Student A has to upload to the course and then download student B’s,C’sD’s etc,.so that they can review and comment. Even with broadband it’s a pain..
What CyberCampus has been doing to help alleviate this for students is to have them send their presentation to us using “Yousendit.com.” We then use Impaticato to publish the file to their course (it encodes it to a java player file). You can imagine how this will not scale, even at our sized University.
The nice thing about Bubbleshare is that it will allow students to do everything themself. Bubbleshare allows a student to upload (in batch) images. This means that a student can export their PowerPoint and then upload them to Bubbleshare. After they are uploaded a student can add narration and captions, and then publish and share the presentation as a slideshow. What’s also nice is that you can rearrange the order that the slides play by dragging the slide to a new position within the sequence (yes through the wonders of AJAX).
It’s in beta (no suprise there) and, it’s free (also no suprise ), but it’s definately worth checking out especially if you have students in online courses that you want to be able to produce presentations.
About it being free: The hesitation I always have with free services is that I’m never too sure if I should build interest with students and faculty in using the service. Will it be around for long? Will the URL persist (if it’s a a graded presentation this becomes important). For the most part, I tend to express to the instructors I support that apps and tools will come and go, and the more you accept this as the norm, the less you will be dissapointed.
If interested, here’s an example of a Bubbleshare presentation I made from a PowerPoint. An upcoming Workshop
All that I did was to export the PowerPoint slides as .jpg’s – uploaded the directory of images and then add the narration and a few balloons. Online Audio recording is powered by Flash Server. Of course I am happy about this since I have been waiting for Flash COm to catch on in this way for years. It works well and fits the online application model.