Saturday, July 26, 2008

Publishing a PowerPoint slideshow from GoogleDocs to a Moodle course
  • With Google Presentor can import your powerpoint files into GoogleDocs, and then by following this tutorial, you can publish these presentations into your Moodle course. The process is a little tricky, but has these benefits:
  • You can edit the document online, and have it be updated in your Moodle course.
  • Your students can view the presentation without having to download any plug-ins, or have Powerpoint installed
  • Many teachers struggle with various methods to convert PowerPoint to a format that is easy for their students to view, and Google Docs is one free way to solve this problem.
To get started, upload the Powerpoint file to your GoogleDocs by clicking the Upload button

and locating the Powerpoint file on your computer.
The select the file, and click the "Open" button:
This will start the upload process. Depending on the file size and your network connection, this may take a little time.
Once the presentation has been uploaded, it will show up in your GoogleDocs:
You can click the file to edit in Google Presentations or to publish it to Moodle.

To publish the file, click the Publish button. This opens up a notification screen, and now you can click the Publish document to actually publish the document. This opens up the "Publish this document" screen.

Here you can preview the document, and decide what size to display it at. Of course you need to make sure that the presentation is still understandable at the smaller size. If it is not, you can edit to make text, etc. larger, and re-publish it, or select a larger presentation size.
For this tutorial, I've selected the "Medium 555px" size.
Now there are two ways to put this presentation in your Moodle course, a simple way, and a bit more tricky way.

The simple way is the same as in the previous tutorial, just copy the document link and paste into a Moodle resource. This works fine, but presents the file in a pop-up window. Perhaps you would prefer to embed the presentation in a resource, so that you can add notes, etc.
To embed the file, you will have to use the 'iframe' code provided by Google:
Select the iframe code and copy it.

Then open the Moodle course, and turn editing on, and then choose Compose a Webpage, from the "Add a resource..." drop down.


On compose a web page screen, give the file a name.



Then down past the optional summary in the content field, turn the the code view on


In code view, paste the iframe code.


Then turn code view back on. The code view disapears.



Click Save and view course. Now you can see the presentation in the course as shown below.
Students can now click the Presentation, and view it. Using the iframe method enables you to embed the Presentation in other Moodle activities.
For instance, you could embed multiple presentations in a Moodle Lesson:
Summary:
Google Presentations offers a nice way to publish Powerpoint presentations to your students, and to display those presentations within Moodle activities.