August 6, 2007
A New Way to Mix PowerPoint and Audio
PowerPoint has an audio function that lets you add narration to your lecture slides, but a number of people find it difficult to use. And what if you want more than your own voice, but music or sound clips of other people?
On the Web 2.0 Teaching Tools blog, Alan A. Lew, a professor at Northern Arizona University, points to another solution. The Web site Slideshare, where people can upload and share PowerPoint presentations, has a new feature called Slidecasts.
A free service, Slidecasts start with PowerPoint slides that have been uploaded to the Slideshare site and adds sound from an MP3 audio file that exists someplace on the Web. (Podcast sites, blogs, and Web pages are good hosts.) Slidecast lets you move the slide transitions to any place in the audio file, easily creating a slick and seamless presentation that doesn’t require complex recording or audio-streaming programs. It does, however, require reliable Web access to the Slideshare site, or your lecture will get disrupted. —Josh Fischman
Posted on Monday August 6, 2007 | Permalink |Comments
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That’s a great tool!
Definitely a time-saver compared to the 3 hours I spent last Friday to produce a 37-second online video about the ‘I-can-get-my-institution-to-the-top-of the-college-rankings’ Challenge .
First, I created the PowerPoint presentation, saved all the slides as jpgs, then imported them in Windows Movie Maker where I added the music and edited the slide show before uploading it to YouTube.
Slidecasts are the way to go. Thanks for the info!
— Karine Joly Aug 6, 03:30 PM #
This is the LOOOOOOOONG way to so things! A much faster way to do all of this is to simply capture the lecture and slides in real time….just download SmartBoard’s free software.
I use a wireless mic and I have my lecture vodcasted about 5 minutes after the class! You can also easily convert the movie file into anything you want…like flash, mpeg or quicktime movie.
— Peter Naegele Aug 6, 06:03 PM #
Heck, another Alan in Arizona spotted 2 weeks earlier, and actually had a demo of content.
http://cogdogblog.com/2007/07/24/slidecast/
— Biff Cantrell Aug 6, 07:15 PM #
What about intellectual property rights as this is so freely available?
— James Steele Aug 6, 09:51 PM #
Does anyone know if you can add captions to the presentation? We have to be careful to remember the accessibility issues as we move further into the digital domain…
— Jayme Johnson Aug 7, 02:09 PM #