A post on the OpenACS discussion board clued me in to a neat little technology piece called S5. Basically, it takes a single, simple HTML file and turns it into a cross-browser slide show. No more messy, crufty PowerPoint-exported HTML; this is nice and clean. (Check out the demo to see it in action.)
But the bigger benefit is that you can create a single content file and, using Javascript and CSS, allow students to display it as a slide show, on-screen scrollable lecture notes, or printable lecture notes. I would love to see a simple authoring tool that does this; I don’t think it would take a whole lot of tweaking for this purpose.
A very cool tool. I’ve bookmarked it. You’re right that it’s not quite simple and user-friendly enough for general faculty use right now, but the potential is certainly there.
I had a similar reaction when I first heard about S5. Instead of locking up lecture notes inside a Powerpoint, why not imagine a slideshow as one possible representation of that data?
Apparently some Drupal developers have already implemented S5 in a new slideshow module. I don’t think it has been released yet because of license issues (ability to include S5 in Drupal CVS or if it has to kept outside). Hopefully, we will see an S5 final soon and a finished Drupal module!
http://bryght.com/node/121 talks about the Drupal module.
Here’s another example of an authoring tool based on S5. It’s not quite what I’d want for instructors, but it’s getting closer.
Yes, S5 is powerful. We’re actually doing some work now in our CourseForum and ProjectForum wikis which allow taking a wiki page and generating an S5 presentation from it. Makes for a very simple authoring tool!