Presentation

Google Slide presentation

The image to the left is actually a Google Slide presentation embedded into this webpage. If you click on the small arrows below the image you can toggle back and forth between slides. If you hover your mouse over the top right corner of the image, you can pop the slide presentation out to see it larger. Here is a tutorial to guide you through how to use this tool.

Google Slides works a lot like PowerPoint. Some of the affordances of Google Slides include:

• Google Slides integrates within the Google Workspace environment to provide a unique way to share your slides, and to collaborate with others on the creation of slide decks. As you can see, it's easy to drop a Google Slide deck right into another Google application like the one used to create this website (Google Sites).

• Google Slides enables simple animation, but not as sophisticated in this respect as PowerPoint.

• Google Slides offers templates and themes that can be used to add customization and NYU branding to the slide presentation appearance.

• You can upload PowerPoint presentations to Google Drive and convert them into Google Slides.

Learn more.

PowerPoint is a slide presentation application that is part of the Microsoft Office suite of applications. It is exponentially more powerful than Google Slides, although the learning curve is steeper for beginners. If you have never used PowerPoint before, you may want to get started by taking a glance at the PowerPoint information page via Microsoft's web resource. If you would like to view an excellent tutorial, check out this step-by-step asynchronous course on Lynda.com which is great for beginners, but also a nice refresher course for more experienced users.

Prezi is a unique presentation tool that offers the ability to present materials using dynamic layout and animation templates as well as tools for superimposing presentation material over your video image during Zoom meetings (potentially useful for online instruction). Prezi is really premised on the use of motion/animation to provide greater participant interest and engagement with presentation materials. Some folks complain that getting carried away with Prezi animations can lead to dizziness, so a good tip is to not go overboard with too much movement. (The same can sometimes be said for heavily animated PowerPoint presentations). There's not a lot of research on the effectiveness of Prezi vs. other presentation tools in education, but here's a modest review and small scale study of one institutional experience which may be of interest. Learn more.