BP8_2010023_DiscoveringWeb2.0Tools

Slide Rocket is really cool...

Over the past few days, I’ve been researching a variety Web 2.0 tools in which I’ve been trying to lend a more critical eye towards those sites and resources that might best impact the learning goals of my students. As aspiring media professionals, my students need both a broad set of software and media competencies coupled with the “soft” skills needed to succeed in business.

Within the career college environment, we are working very hard to prepare young people for entry-level positions throughout a variety of media related fields. Per the needs of our employer base and current job trends found in the United States, we’ve seen an increasing demand for students with well developed interpersonal skills. As such, I’ve specifically been looking for platforms and applications that could foster strong group interaction, peer-to-peer communication, and collaborative learning and content development.

As many of our workplaces are challenged today with unprecedented competition, we imagine tomorrow’s professional environments to be more collaborative and team oriented in nature. Furthermore, many of our graduates go on to launch free-lance careers of their own. Clearly within this direct client relationship, our graduates need to have strong communication skills and an ability to work with a variety of diverse peoples.

With these criteria and needs in mind, I’ve been looking specifically for tools that offer a strong collaborative component that also blends a workflow need seem in many business environments. Fortunately, with Slide Rocket, I might have found just the one.

Slide Rocket is engineered as an online slide and presentation development tool. However, upon further digging, I found it to be quite compelling as it offers a wide variety of functionalities that one would often assume would not be present in an online application.

Many of my classmates and I have found that thus far, working collaboratively in projects using applications such as Google Docs and others can increase workflow, team cohesion, and even avoid project errors and omissions. Often times, and even as recently as last semester, when working with static host-based applications like Power Point, one of my groups experienced significant confusion as to which version of the document was our current file. After emailing edited versions back and forth, we quickly lost track of our titling system and ultimately had to leverage another online-based tool in the process.

Not to mention, despite the cross-platform nature of the majority of today’s technology, I still witness almost weekly scenarios wherein a file does or does not up load with correct formatting, fonts, etc depending upon the version of the application happens to be loaded onto the computer in the classroom or board room. Using an entirely online or cloud-based resource would mitigate any performance issues between computers, operating systems, software versions, or peripheral drives.

In short, Slide Rocket is a really exciting piece of software. Individuals can leverage the suite themselves, invite others to privately view the presentation, or allow an entire group editing abilities as well. Furthermore, Slide Rocket houses a “media library” wherein you’re able to store audio, video, and image files in their servers for later use with any presentation. Additionally, Slide Rocket uses a layout quite similar to iMovie wherein you can have multiple “projects” all hosted together. During my test phase, I developed two presentations for work as well as two more slide shows for friends and family involving vacation photos. The number of presentations you can build in Slide Rocket is only limited to your online cloud storage package. My free membership leveraged 250 megs and a paid package with 1 Gig of storage started at only $12 a month.

Within one of my marketing classes, students are required to “pitch” their final ideas or projects. Last semester, I decided to experiment a little with the final course assessments. Instead of leaving students to complete an individual final project, I allowed students to work in groups. Previously, I had discovered that some of the material covered was so foreign to our student body, that the integration and absorption of some of the more abstract information was difficult. In order to help reinforce the content, we started using final projects that were collaborative in nature where each student worked with a peer-partner, not unlike our FSO Critical Friends resource. Ultimately, we found that the student engagement and the quality of output within the final projects was significantly improved from group practice. With a tool like Slide Rocket, I’ll be able to help students work together almost up to their own presentation time with ample media, support, and editing ability. Not only that, Slide Rocket will import Keynote and Power Point presentations if a project had started in one of those platforms.

I have always believed the adage that it takes a village to raise a child. Surly, in the dynamic and diffuse nature of our current educational system (wherein the world and our knowledge base seems to expand at ever increasing rates) so too shouldn’t we leverage more supportive learning structures than the solitary student seated at a desk with an essay?

I can’t even begin to express how exiting I think this platform could be. I was able to create compelling presentation shows within an hour, upload all sorts of content for later use, and invite other users to comment and edit. I really believe that this application is a window into the future- cloud based computing, collaborative work-flow, and tremendous creative potential. Check it out…

Photos and screenshots courtesy of Slide Rocket.