Thanks to a post from Elizabeth Clark, I’m excited to say that I agree with her that 280 slides has wonderful potential for teachers and students alike. In fact, this will become a key teaching tool for me in 2009, as I get my students away from desktop applications and into collaborative online tools.

This is a great place to start. Kids are all too familiar with powerpoint, youtube, and …..uh,oh , google images. How do we make the use of these tools more organic?

For my own presentations, and theirs – this is the go! Why?

Because 280 Slides is a free web-based service where you can “[c]reate beautiful presentations, access them from anywhere, and share them with the world.” It allows you to

• import existing PowerPoint presentations
• access your presentations from any computer with an internet connection
• use media from services like Flickr and YouTube
• use built-in themes
• automatically save and recover your presentations
• download your presentation to PowerPoint
• publish your presentation on SlideShare, e-mail it, or embed it in a website
• create your presentations on the web in your browser without downloading any software

I totally love that it works basically the same way as blogs, wikis and nings – use a url or upload an image to put it into your presentation. You can search YouTube or Vimeo to add some multimedia, as well as uploading something.

So students can make their movies, store their images – all online – then embedd them into their presentation – and download, upload, share and …… so the online conversation continues with the power of cloud computing.

Good one!