EduTechnorama

As mentioned in one of my comments on a previous post, some of my co-workers and I were involved in a faculty professional learning group formed to investigate the usage and employment of podcasting in higher-ed.

One of the things we came to a conclusion upon was the fact that it is EXTREMELY time-consuming to put together a good, engaging, and pedagogically sound audio presentation. Apple computer is putting together several tools to hopefully make that easier.

http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/features/podcasts.html

Given Apple’s success in making difficult things easier for people who are intimidated by technology, hopefully this would put this in the hands of instructors who can make good use of it.

Educators have bored their students to death with it…

Sales Engineers have hounded us for money with it…

Conference presenters have put us to sleep with it…

Its inventors insist that it exist in our computing environments…all in hopes that we pay them money just for the privilege…

So what is this ghastly beast? And how can we stop it? Of course this is in jest. Any presentation software to be used to inform, educate, motivate an audience, etc. eventually MUST possess the capabilities that PowerPoint has. The principles of using a large screen to do this isn’t necessarily evil. So who is the true killer of the true intent and power of PowerPoint and its competitors? Most likely its users. Because it is relatively pervasive and so easy to get a presentation going educators and other informers often fall back on it to be the sole source of instruction. Keeping this in mind, my opinion that removing the human element from instruction is almost always detrimental to content that is by nature already dry. The solution? Develop talents of presentation style in the human first, and then focus on improving the human’s use of technology.

Given all this, what is the best software that will allow teachers to do this? Google now offers an online knockoff of PowerPoint in its Docs suite that has already revolutionized word processing and spreadsheet use. Here’s a recent comparison review from Slate.com. I’ll let you be the judge: