Online Presentations: Screencasts, Vocaroo/Vocalic & other nifty online toys! in Cool Techy Things to Use for Language Ed. (Teaching/Tutoring/Learning).

Screencast-o-matic

Screencast-o-matic is where I recorded:

. My computer did not have a mic, so I tried to time the slides to make everything readable. Some people are fine with its speed and some say it is a little fast. However, it is short, so if you need to, you can pause it, replay part of it, or whatever. That is the nice thing about recorded online presentations. If you miss something, you can always go back and view it again.
I like to keep mine short whenever possible.
Prezi

If you don’t like your computer’s slide/presentation software or don’t have it on your computer, you can always use Google Slides from Google Drive or utilities like Prezi (the latter of which people have made excellent screencasts in combination with Screencast-o-matic). I recently saw a fantastic use of Prezi at a humor research conference at Texas A&M . It doesn’t have that predictable linear format the traditional programs like Power Point and Google Slides have. However, if you rely on some form of linear organization to keep track of what you need to say, Power Point or one of the many programs like it, might be better for you. I would, however, encourage you to at least try it out and see how it fits you should you be in a setting where you may have to give more than one presentation per year.

Vocalic

Vacaroo is a handy little site you can audio record things. I’m not sure if it can be integrated into a presentation, but if you are teaching or tutoring online, this is a way students/tutees can be assessed for speaking and listening or pronunciation. I have used this before for vocal blog entries (before my old blog domain died ) as well as a way to help myself memorize one act plays, poetry, and other literary works during my undergraduate career.

The instructions are pretty straightforward, but if your student(s)/tutee(s) are lower than intermediate level, you may want to modify them. Anyone wanting to record a voice entry needs to have a microphone enabled and it doesn’t like to work with serious firewalls. OH, and I don’t know if this is still the case, but this should really only be for temporary storage because, when I used it last, the links were only good for six months and then they dumped my audio files.

I will add more to this list later.