Slideshows are a great way of presenting information and supporting discussions; so, we will have a look at the following things that can be useful in Moodle courses:
- Converting presentation slides to images in order to integrate them in a Moodle lesson
- Sharing our presentations through an online service and then embedding them in Moodle
- Creating photo slideshows on the Web to later embed them in a Moodle resource or activity
An easy way to create an exercise in our Moodle courses is to build a lesson around a presentation that we used in class, for example, in Microsoft PowerPoint. This will provide the content and then we can add some questions, working with the existing material and not having to rebuild it again in the Moodle lesson. The easiest way to do this is to convert the PowerPoint (or similar) presentation to images and then add these images to branch tables or question pages in our lesson.
The problem with this is that the image width of standard slides will be 960 pixels, a little bit large as we saw for a Moodle course. To overcome this problem (without having to resize each image in GIMP), after opening the presentation we should change the slide width and height before exporting them as images. We can do this by going to the Themes tab, clicking on the Slide size options button, and then clicking on the Page Setup option, as shown in the following screenshot:
By setting both width and height values to half of their current values (in cm, check the following conversion to get the equivalent pixels), we will get images with a width of 480 pixels, which is a good size for inserting them in a lesson. If this size makes the text in the slides look too small, we can use a width of 640 pixels. So, we would use the following values:
|
Desired width (pixels) |
Width (cm) |
Height (cm) |
|---|---|---|
|
480 |
9,52 |
12,7 |
|
640 |
12,7 |
16,93 |
So now we are ready to export our presentation, by opening the presentation and then going to File | Save as Pictures (the default image format is JPEG) and saving it to a folder. Each slide will be a separate image. We can then add it to a Moodle lesson, for example, just like adding a regular picture in Moodle.
One drawback of this technique is accessibility, as the text in the images will not be read by screen readers. A possible solution for this is to add a good description text to the images while inserting them using the HTML editor in Moodle.
SlideShare (http://www.slideshare.net) is an online service for sharing presentations. It is a good place to look for presentations for our courses. It's also a place where we can upload our presentations and make them available to many. Another advantage is that if we don't have a good upload limit in our Moodle course; we can add the presentation here and then embed it in our course!
To publish a presentation in SlideShare, we just need to create an account and upload our presentation in several supported formats (Microsoft PowerPoint or Apache Open Office Impress, PDF, and so on). SlideShare will generate code necessary to put our presentation anywhere on the Web.
So, after signing in, let's upload the presentation by clicking on the Upload link at the top of the screen and then filling in the required forms.
When we click on the UPLOAD button, we need to navigate to the destination and select the file that we want to upload. We should then fill in the details with some information about the presentation and allow (or not) readers to download our presentation.
After we click on the Save changes button, we can then get the embed code required to add it to our Moodle course.
In Module 7, Music and the commons, a presentation made available through this service is used.
Animoto (http://animoto.com) is a web application that allows us to create photo slideshows either using the images uploaded from our computer or from images that are already on the Web (in services such as Flickr). And we don't need to install any software!
This can be helpful in our course Module 5, Being a musician, where students have to create a photo story of their favorite artist.
After signing up, we should hit the CREATE button in the front page and then select one of the free available styles. These styles allow us to create short 30-second photo slideshows with a predefined template for free.
We are then taken to the slideshow production page, where we can add pictures (from our computer or from services such as Flickr and Instagram), change the soundtrack, or add titles and captions.
We can drag-and-drop pictures and text slides to reorder them and when we are set, we should click on the PREVIEW VIDEO button. Notice that if we upload more images than the allowed 30-second limit, these will show on the right of the sequencer in the so called tray.
A low resolution preview of the photo slideshow is then presented, and we can fill in some details and produce it, that is, publish it.
The final video will show up, and to get the embed code, we should click on the More button:
Finally, we just have to copy the embed code displayed in the tab Embedded video.
And at last, paste it to Moodle (remembering to use the HTML edit mode), and we get something like this:
