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RESOURCE REVIEW
DOI: dx.doi.org/10.5195/jmla.2017.210
THE PRESENTER’S TOOLBOX are not only better suited to social have been handpicked by Slideshare. LinkedIn, 1000 West sharing platforms than their desk- SlideShare and are likely to be Maude Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA top brethren but can be launched good examples to follow. from any computer with a web 94085; http://www.slideshare.net; You can also find presentations browser—a huge relief during rare LinkedIn basic account: free, on topics related to yours, which but inevitable hardware disasters. LinkedIn Career version: may give you ideas to incorpo- They also provide an opportunity $24.99/month. rate—with proper attribution—into to share presentations with others your own work. SlideShare can authorSTREAM. AuthorStream Pri- and to discover content that others also help you share your presenta- vate, C-133, Second Floor, Industri- have created. al Area, PCL Chowk, Phase VIII, tions with others and promote your Mohali-160071, India; All of the platforms discussed professional brand. You can upload http://www.authorstream.com; here offer free versions. But with all conference presentations, instruc- basic version: free, pro version: of the options available online, how tional slides, or other types of $4.20/month or $ 49.95/year. do you begin to narrow your choic- presentations to SlideShare. es and select the right one for you? Slideshare allows you to Prezi. Prezi, 633 Folsom Street, 5th In this review, I share my first im- browse by category and create cus- Floor, San Francisco, CA 94107; pressions of five online presenta- tom templates for presentations, so https://prezi.com; public account: tion services that will keep your you can use a standard look and free, Enjoy Account: $59.04/year, audience engaged without tapping feel to make your presentations Pro Account: $159/year. your wallet. easily recognizable. Note that you Projeqt. Projeqt, 488 Madison Ave- SlideShare will not be able to include narra- nue, New York, NY 10022; tion, so your slides need to stand https://projeqt.com; free. SlideShare allows you to upload on their own without audio. To and share MS Word files, portable emaze. emaze, Al Raha Beach, Abu help people find your presenta- document format files (PDFs), Dhabi; https://www.emaze.com; tions, you can include up to twenty presentations (PowerPoint, Key- basic account: free, Pro account: tags or keywords as well as a title note, or OpenOffice), infographics, $108/year (month-to-month pric- and brief description of the presen- video, and more from your desk- ing available for educators), Busi- tation. Once you have uploaded top, Google Drive, Dropbox, or ness account: $468/year. your presentations, you can share Gmail. Presentations can then be the link with colleagues, share searched, viewed, and shared by them via social media, and embed anyone or embedded on other sites. them in a website, blog, or SlideShare is useful for medical LinkedIn profile. INTRODUCTION librarians as a source of content, a At my institution, we have Most of us at some point in our source of example presentations to found that SlideShare is useful for careers need to present our ideas to stimulate ideas and help you be- facilitating teaching and learning an audience. We may present to come a better presenter, and a plat- on our campus through faculty, library colleagues, potential em- form for sharing presentations and student, and staff research re- ployers, or students. We may pro- building your professional brand. quests. Whether your client is pre- vide training or present at To get ideas or improve your skills paring for a class project or grand conferences. In addition to tried- in creating presentations, browse round or is researching back- and-true tools like PowerPoint and SlideShare to see what others are ground information on a specific Keynote, some online, web-native creating. The presentations fea- resource, SlideShare may have a tools are now available. These tools tured on the SlideShare home page ready-to-go presentation related to are a great place to start, as they the topic.
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DOI: dx.doi.org/10.5195/jmla.2017.210 authorSTREAM loaded with a free account be pub- shared on any platform and em- authorSTREAM is a free platform licly available [1]. authorSTREAM bedded into websites much like a for uploading, hosting, and sharing also has my favorite feature, “pre- YouTube video. PowerPoint, Keynote, and PDF sent live,” which allows you to pre- In addition to presentations, presentations online. It has a large sent in an online meeting in real Prezi has other uses in academic user base and helps you discover time, while you provide your own libraries and is especially useful for great presentations in various cate- audio. presentations that focus on visual content. For example, you can cre- gories, including business and fi- I use both tools to follow other ate interactive maps of your library nance, education, product manuals, educators, other librarians, social and/or specific areas, for example, science, technology, and many oth- media and marketing profession- to show the location of special col- ers. As a presenter, authorSTREAM als, design professionals, and aca- lections or a department’s books makes it easy to share your demics to see how they organize and journals. I also use Prezi to cre- slideshows through blogs, web- knowledge and make content visu- ate anatomy and physiology re- sites, and YouTube. ally engaging. source supplements. Prezi helps Comparing authorSTREAM and Prezi me make exploring the human SlideShare body—even tedious step-by-step Prezi is different than both instructions—more engaging. You Both Slideshare and author- SlideShare and authorSTREAM. It can embed a Prezi link in an online STREAM allow you to search and is a virtual whiteboard for trans- course to allow students and facul- browse for presentations; deter- forming presentations into compel- ty to repeat lessons and access in- mine whether or not to allow oth- ling stories and visually flowing structions anytime. ers to comment on or download lessons. Using the zoomable inter- your content; include videos in face, Prezi allows you to navigate Prezi is also especially useful your presentations; determine an from one idea to the next in which- for presentations that cover several appropriate copyright or Creative ever order you choose. As Prezi disparate subjects. When present- Commons license for your content; users will know, the order in which ing on a single topic, the linear na- share and embed content; view, your presentation visits the various ture of PowerPoint works well. But like, comment on, follow, and often elements on the canvas is known as when covering several topics, it can download the content of others; the “path.” When presenting, you be helpful to show the audience all and capture analytics about num- can take things out of your path of them at first and then visit each ber of views, downloads, com- without taking them out of your of them, one by one. For example, ments, tweets, likes, and links. presentation, so you can make a in a session on online tools and technologies, the content is linked authorSTREAM focuses on talk fit into a specific time length, but when people view the presen- by little other than its format: presentation files from PowerPoint online. Using Prezi can help at- and Keynote. It allows you to cre- tation afterward, they can see the full version with more detail. tendees make sense of the broader ate channels, present live, and pur- context of these tools. chase templates from its Prezi is especially powerful Presentation Marketplace. A new when you want to make static con- I find that Prezi encourages feature offers you the ability to tent dynamic. You can stretch any more engagement. People literally save presentations as videos for image to any size, limited only by sit up in their seats and take notice, free as long as they are under five the resolution of the image. You and they seem to remember the minutes. Unlike SlideShare, au- can use an image as the back- presentation more afterward. thorSTREAM allows you to include ground for your entire presentation Whether you opt to fully customize audio narration with your presen- and then add points of interaction a presentation from scratch or from tation. authorSTREAM also allows with that image. It is also easy to one of the many available tem- you to upload private or public embed YouTube videos: just copy plates, Prezi’s approach is unique presentations, even in a free ac- and paste the uniform resource and allows you to take a more crea- count, unlike SlideShare, which locator (URL), and Prezi does the tive approach to presentations. It requires that all presentations up rest. A presentation in Prezi can be does, however, require some train- ing to use.
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DOI: dx.doi.org/10.5195/jmla.2017.210
Projeqt emaze emaze is a great product for li- Projeqt allows you to create and emaze is another online presenta- brary tutorials, introductions to share dynamic presentations from tion tool for professionals. With its class topics, and library video scratch or convert old static slides. zoomable interface that navigates tours. They also offer a library of Simply upload PowerPoint files, from one idea to the next, emaze is presentations that you can use and PDFs, or multiple image files at similar to Prezi but differs in that modify. While the free account is once and create a dynamic and you can present content three di- very good, paid accounts offer portable online Projeq, with no mensionally. Unfortunately, emaze more features, and volume dis- coding required. Projeqts can be only allows new presentations to counts are available for school dis- embedded and shared anywhere. be created based on templates. That tricts and colleges. limits your ability to customize The tool also connects with a Each of these five tools offers your own design, though emaze wide array of social media tools, something different, but all of them plans to allow custom designs soon allowing users to display live Twit- are user friendly. If you are looking in one of their premium plans. The ter feeds, run Spotify playlists, ref- for a top-notch slide builder with program allows you to import ex- erence Flickr images or Google an impressive, free option, any one isting PowerPoint slides. When you maps, or incorporate a wealth of of these products would be a great do, you will be prompted to apply other live feeds, all updated in real addition to your toolbox. an existing emaze theme to the time. A Projeqt presentation re- presentation. turned to in a week (or even an REFERENCE hour) may not be exactly the same Like Prezi, emaze presentations 1. James M. SlideShare reviews [Inter- as the one shared at a conference. are accessible everywhere via the net]. Edshelf; 5 Oct 2014 [cited 6 Feb To me, this feels as if Projeqt is in- cloud; can be downloaded as 2017]. viting me to tell a story using social presentations, PDFs, or videos
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ISSN 1558-9439 (Online)
Journal of the Medical Library Association 105 (3) July 2017 jmla.mlanet.org