Flickr as a presentation tool

By Beth Kanter
Beth's Blog

View this screencast here

This is a quick guide on how to use the photo sharing site Flickr as a visual resource for your Powerpoint or Keynote presentations. This screencast consists of a Powerpoint slide show that Cheryl Hanback and I used to lead an N-TEN Affnity Group of technology trainers at the 2005 Nonprofit Technology Conference. We used some of the ideas presented here as a jumping off point for small group sharing on how to make trainings more interactive. The Flickr set has notes and pointers to other resources if you are interested in the content.

After seeing Nancy White's experiment and discovering Amit Agarwal's excellent instructions for Embed Powerpoint Slides as Flash Presentations in your Blog without Spending a Dime, I just had to try it.

The instructions from Digital Inspiration were fantastic, but I made a few newbie mistakes that took me more time and were a little frustrating:

1.) I exported the slides as jpegs because the upload would bomb when I tried to upload the pngs as a batch with inadequate bandwidth.

2.) I wasn't careful how I placed the photos into my Flickr uploader. As a result, they didn't appear in the right order in my Flickr account and it messed up the slide show order. I took me several uploads to get it right: You have to be careful and put the last in first, second to last second, and so on.

3.) I didn't know how to correctly add the height and width tags - so I needed it spelled out for me. So, I had to google the tag to find an example.

4.) I was confused by the editing of the code to add my specific ID numbers and tags. So I did it in a way that might be less confusing for someone who isn't experienced with HTML code.

Some thoughts about my screencast creation process:

• I need to learn how to edit out a word in my voiceover and replace it with the correct word. In this case, I described the IFRAME tag as javascript. My heart sank when I realized my mistake (just when I was ready to produce!). Humor always comes in handy!

• I originaly produced this at 800x600 pixels as a SWF (Flash video) with highest quality audio/video and the resulting file was a wooping 72MB. So I decided to invest more time playing around with the production settings. I rendered 10 different versions (six in SWF with different audio sampling and video frame rates and sizes, two in QuickTime and two in WMV.) In the end, I decided to produce as a SWF at 640x480 size with second to highest audio/video quality. It worked well.

• My workflow. I created a storyboard with small scenes. I found that I don't like reading a script word for word, so I use bullet points instead. This is what worked for me: I would set up each scene. Capture my rehearsal. Listen to it. And then tape it again if needed. Then I do a rough edit of the scene (take out the ums, put in markers for captions or zooms to be added later). When the movie is done, I go back and do fine-tuning:

- edit out ums, though not all of them
- add close-ups
- add captions if I forgot to mention something important
- cut out long silences
- add titles and voiceovers
- then production.