280Slides Workshop

In our Multimedia class, we began a Unit on Presentations. You know, when you're sitting in class and the teacher says "Powerpoint time", that sort of presentation. At first I was rather meh at the whole idea because even though powerpoints are a useful teaching tool, some professors...(at UVM who will remain nameless) use it as their only form and it can become very boring. But after we started the unit, just seeing the different tools that you have at hand to make them, is just amazing.
We started with 280Slides.com. This is a lot like powerpoint that is often on school computers and such, only it is through the internet and doesn't have the vast amount of options that you would get from powerpoint. But it is free, and it has a lot of other merits that outweigh that of you're run of the mill presentation program.
* First of all, as stated above, it is a free program. You can sign up for it just as easily as if you were to sign up for facebook or email or something.
* It is right there on the internet, so there is no hassle of changing formats or whatever to make it open on another computer. Since it is already there, you don't have to worry about graphics , words, and other portions of the presentation to disappear in transition.

Getting Started-
I found that after a few minutes of playing with the different tools that 280slides had to offer, I was able to make my way through the presentation with relative ease. So the next thing to do was to pick a topic. I decided to talk about setting up a scene to film for a movie. I had just been studying this in my movie class and as it was fresh in my mind it would be easier to write about and be able to focus more on the presentation part of the assignment. I decided on a light blue background, with white writing. I went slide by slide, making a point on each one, giving dialogue about it and quite often backing it up with some sort of graphic.
When we presented them, the feedback was that I had made more of an online tutorial rather than a stand up presentation. I needed to put less on the slides and be able to explain more with the slides as the BACKUP to what I was saying. I also found that somehow I had managed to change the font from white to black without noticing. So it was an interesting experience, and a good tool to have but I definitely have more things to learn about the program and presentation making.
When finished I published it to slideshare, so if anyone would like to take a look at it, you can find it at this link ---> http://www.slideshare.net/lanelane12/in-the-movies