Slideshare

Slideshare is an application that has been around for some time now and one that I have used quite a lot hitherto,

 

 

to upload and share my own PowerPoint presentations,

 

(Note that unfortunately, audio with this slideshow, which is me practising for a presentation I gave on behalf of the German publishers Cornelsen, is not synchronized with slides - sorry!)

 

 

or , to upload and share my students' presentations

 

 

(This particular slideshow was embedded in a student wiki after the the student in question had given her presentation and was then used for peer feedback and comment)

 

 

or to upload and share material produced by colleagues:

 

 

However, while sitting in on one of Mark Powell's Cert IBET workshops I heard the rather simple but none the less effective idea of using Slideshare as a resource for Business English teaching activities as well as a means of sharing material. So, for example, when teaching presentation skills, a slideshow uploaded to Slideshare by Garr Reynolds, the Presentation Zen  author, can be used to discuss the role of slide design in giving effective talks:

 

 

Another great idea mentioned by Mark was to search for presentations on Slideshare that perhaps correspond to your students interests, or are related to their work and then use these to practise the particular presenting techniques you are focussing on. This ready made resource can save time, provide targetted visual prompts and allows the learners to focus on the verbal side of presenting without having to worry about producing slides.

 

So just as a quick example, follow this link to see the wealth of material availble by simply entering "Marketing" in the search box: Marketing slideshows

 

Finally, here's another very effective presntation you can find on Slideshare which you could use either to discuss slide design or as the basis for work on brand management:

 

 

There are of course other file sharing applications, for example Scribd, or Google Docs or Zoho Show, which also do a great job if you want to upload and share material you or your students have created, but I think at the moment at least Slideshare seems to be the best bet for finding business related material you can use as a teaching resource.

 

Note: There seems to be a slight problem embedding Slideshare in PBwiki - it works fine with wikisspces, wetpaint blogger and so on. You can see from this page, however, that it is possible, but to do so, rather than use the "Insert Plugin" button, you need to switch to "Source" (the HTML editor) and insert the embed code directly into the message window.

 

If you would like to comment or add your own teaching ideas activities for using Slideshare of the other slideshare applications mentioned here, just click on "Edit page" as usual and post your ideas below this line:

 

 

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Your ideas will be very welcome here!