Lecture slides and blogsites

I’ve been experimenting once again to find the most effective and efficient way of embedding slides into unit blogs. When I’m using PowerPoint the easiest way to store and show slides pre- and post-session is through slideshare, the YouTube of slideshows. Slides on slideshare are easily embeded on a wordpress blog such as this one simply by copying the embed code from slideshare into a wordpress post or page – as I’ve done below:

But I also often use YouTube videos in the sessions and need a way to make these available through the blog – integrated with the slides. A couple of ways of doing this:
1. Use apture, a wordpress plugin that allows you to build related documents around an embed. So, here are the same slides with the related YouTube videos.

The advantage here is that when you click on a related resource (in this case a YouTube video) the video plays on the site in a separate window – very useful if you want the students to stay on the unit blog and not be tempted to wander through YouTube related videos.

2. But the videos are not fully integrated with the slides and it seems that I’m not the only one wanting this feature for slideshows. Slideshare now offer it. You can link to YouTube videos (and specify start/end points) in Slideshare and specify where they should appear in the slideshow. So now we have:

(The first video appears after slide 11) The slideshow even tells us that YouTube videos have been embedded.

More on slideshare features soon.