One day, PowerPoint... One day
For this TED project I was determined to break the mold and find a new and innovative way of giving this presentation. I figured there had to be something else out there that I could use as a change of pace and spice things up a bit. I started looking high and low and found what I thought was the best of my options.
The program that I wanted to use was called Empressr. It allows you either upload and edit an existing presentation, or manufacture your own online. Some of the features are really cool which is why I was initially attracted to it. It allows you to very easily import media from other sources such as Flickr, YouTube, and Google. It provides a search bar for those sites, delivers the results, and you can add the media simply by dragging and dropping. Also, the transitions between slides are very unique. It allows a feature that gives you a random transition between slides, allowing for a unique presentation every time.
However, despite these seemingly groundbreaking characteristics, Empressr seemed to me to still be in its beginning stages. After playing around with it for a few hours, it was apparent that in the long run I would be sacrificing the overall quality of the project to try to use something new. The videos from YouTube wouldn’t play, the fonts are very limited, the controls are a little clunky, and the on-screen canvas doesn’t always match the finished product of the presentation. Good in concept, not worth it in practice.
Long story short… PowerPoint won this battle. But I’ll have the last laugh one day.
The project is finished and ready for presentation. In the name of the element of surprise I’m waiting to post it here until after I unveil it for the class. Per last semester, I am going to post a video that gets at the message I am trying to deliver, and serves as a good summary/precursor for the TED Talk.
The video is of Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard University, talking about ethics on Wikipedia, and Internet Privacy as it applies to “Star Wars Kid”. Enjoy!
