Presentation Tools

I thoroughly enjoyed the Osnagroup’s meeting on Thursday night in Second Life. Dennis Newson (Osnacantab Nesterov) had asked me to prepare a session on presentation tools for the group members. We played with Slideshow image viewers, image viewers that use local chat and dialogue menus and media players all developed by Gavin Dudeney (Dudeney Ge) that pull images in from the web but specifically Flickr or a Ning used by many of the group to display their in-world photographs following a photography course.

We had a few issues to overcome when everyone started playing with their own tools following the demonstration, as soon as someone started any media playing all and showed the same thing so we had to disperse over the three sims into places where small groups could work independently. Also we had to pack away the slide show viewer – it changed everyone’s images every 20 seconds :-)

Following the image viewers we looked at the two different sorts of presentation boards and everyone pulled photographs from their library into the views to make instant presentations. Apparently we overcame at least one avatar fear during that course – someone thought it was impossibly complex and had already given up trying to create their own presentation in world.

We finished by taking two different copies of Shal’s Chalk board, the English version and the version with international characters – these can be used easily to display instant messages or note card contents.

All of the tools shown are easy to use and may help whilst teaching in-world. It was a very relaxed and enjoyable session - at least for me, others may disagree :-)