Simple Presentations with 280slides

There’ve certainly been some good arguments made that PowerPoint presentations don’t make for the best pedagogy. At the very least, we want to be sure that any slide presentations we might use don’t involve Death by Powerpoint.

Sometimes, though, there are reasons why we need to use a slide presentation, so it’s worth taking a look at the tools that might be avaialable. One tool that I rrecently tested is out in beta: 280slides.com.

Useful features

The service has some good things going for it:

• It’s accessible from any computer with an internet connection, and you can run your presentation from within the browser—no desktop application needed. (Unfortunately, it isn’t possible to run a presentation in full-screen mode without using a full-screen browser called Plainview.)
• It has a built-in ability to search the web for images and video (that’s CC-licensed, of course!)
• If you need a copy of your presentation that doesn’t live in the cloud, it’s possible to download it. The service supports PowerPoint (.ppt and .pptx), Open Document (.odp) and PDF formats.
• You can also export your presentation to SlideShare.
• You can upload existing PowerPoint presentations, so it provides a place to store those and make them more readily accessible.

How well does it work?

The service is promising. All of the features I’ve mentioned above make it a service that’s worth considering. However, it’s labeled “beta” for a reason.

• Importing PowerPoint files works, but it may be necessary to tweak the layout of imported files. Here’s how one of my imported slides looked. One of the lines was partially cut off in the import process. Admittedly, this is fairly easy to fix, but it’s annoying if there are a lot of slides in a presentation.



• Animations/visual effects don’t work. If you had an entrance effect in your original presentation, it will be gone once you’ve imported everything (though your text will still be there). If there’s a way to add text animations to a slide, I missed it.
• Themes are limited—there are only nine right now. As the service develops, I suspect there’ll be more options.
• Exporting slides to PowerPoint works as one would expect it to work. The slides I exported from a presentation created in 280slides looked just fine. Sending the presentation to SlideShare also worked well, though the process was slow (SlideShare spent over eleven minutes converting a three-slide presentation. Where the process got bogged down, I don’t know.)

Overall impressions:

If you’re using very simple slides and want or need to have them easily accessible from anywhere, this is a useful service. If you make extensive use of slide presentations, however, you may prefer something more robust for now—though 280slides bears watching as it develops.

[All images are screenhots by Flickr user cavenderamy / Creative Commons licensed]