Web 2.0 with Your Class: 7 Amazing Back-to-school Presentation Tools

For a classroom lesson, especially a class that will matter, today's school staff would prefer a dynamic slideshow (remaining original in PowerPoint or reformed in SCORM-compliant video, DVD, Flash) to a chalk-and-blackboard interpretation. There is no doubt that current education is jumping on the train of Web 2.0, typically represented by the integration of digital technology into classroom and the emergence of social networking sites like Blogs, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. This post covers 7 amazing picks of presentation software or solutions for eager teachers and students who want more broadcasting of a back-to-school masterpiece.

Your First-choice Back-to-school Presentation Tools & Applications

1. MS PowerPoint: The most prevalent presentation-authoring tool developed by Microsoft, great for educators and students to vivify a plain lecture text with lively animations, graphics, music, or even movie clips.

2. Moyea PPT to DVD Burner Edu: An e-Learning program to burn PowerPoint courseware to DVD and convert it to video for cross-platform access on a TV with DVD player and a different computer. From home to school, from desktop to the Web, the presentation tool enables teachers and students to manage their course content on a protective DVD disc and in web-ready video, without bothering to any PowerPoint corruption on a destination device.
Hot Features: Batch process of 12 PowerPoint files. Relieve users from distribution defect of a big PowerPoint file. Retain everything original from PowerPoint to the output DVD. No loss of animations, wipes, sounds or video clips. Watermark to personalize a DVD/video slideshow.

3. Moyea PPT to Video Converter Edu: Green video course creator that makes SCORM compliant video from an e-Learning PowerPoint presentation. Moyea PPT to Video Converter Edu let users expand a course presentation beyond a desktop, but to a video-compliant portable like iPod and iPhone, to a video-hosting site like YouTube and TeacherTube. Great for remote online learning.
Hot Features: Batch conversion of 12 PPT files. Keep complete of a PowerPoint presentation including animations, transitions, music and movie clips to a quality video. Create 12+ video formats from PowerPoint, e.g. ASF, AVI, MOV, FLV, MP4, VOB…

4. Zoho Show: An ONLINE presentation tool that allows you to create a new presentation from scratch using its pre-built themes, as well as to import an existing presentation from both MS PowerPoint (PPT, PPS)and OpenOffice (ODP, SXI). Users can edit, publish, and show their presentations online and export as PPT, PPS, HTML, ODP and PDF.
Hot Features: Free for individual users. Create a presentation full of text, images, shapes, lists, and pre-built content templates
Drawbacks: Limit to PowerPoint file size - no more than 10 MB. Miss on original effects from an existing presentation.

5. SlideShare: The largest website of slideshows, similar to YouTube in the video field. Support presentations of all types: MS PowerPoint, OpenOffice and Apple Keynote. Good for students and educators who want to archive presentations online for sharing and receiving feedbacks.
Hot Features: Free. Bulk upload of presentations. 100MB capacity. Invite friends and colleagues to visit your slideshow via email.
Drawbacks: Miss on all dynamic elements in PowerPoint, like sounds and effects.

6. Empressr: An Ajax and Flash-based service to make and share presentations online. Allows you to save each slide as single image and to make an imported presentation editable.
Hot Feature: Uses Flash and Ajax rather than HTML and Ajax to add more media than other tools including audio and video.
Drawback: Complete loss of original effects in a input presentation.

7. ThinkFree Show: A Java-based presentation application similar to Microsoft PowerPoint. ThinkFree Show offers an ease to create rich presentations and play them through the online editor or by graphic. You can also save your presentations for viewing in Microsoft PowerPoint and share them with others online.
Hot Feature: Can convert PPT to PDF, text and image.
Drawback: Cannot convert properly of a PPT file more than 5MB.

Cheap and fast-to-create, these e-Learning presentation tools have been encouraging staff and faculty nowadays to take more advantage of Web 2.0 technology. Just boost your new school year with a proper tech tool of the above!