EMPRESSR is an effective online alternative for creating and/or sharing slide shows and multi-media presentations.  You can either upload images from your computer or import them from other online sources such as flickr, photobucket, Google Images, or Yahoo!.  EMPRESSR also allows you to import and include audio and video clips in your presentation.  Altogether, EMPRESSR is impressive for the versatility that it offers.

Slides can easily be edited and manipulated right with the application.  There is a good selection of transitions to choose from, and these can be adjusted and set very easily, either for the entire presentation or for individual slides.

The user interface of EMPRESSR is relatively intuitive and easy to learn for someone with experience creating multimedia presentations.  For the novice, however, it would be useful if the site developers would provide more by way of instruction and step-by-step tutorials.

EMPRESSR is not really a tool for collaboration, but it is typical of Web 2.0 applications that facilitate easy sharing and embedding elsewhere on the net.

I’ve embedded a slideshow that I put together with photos I took last Wednesday when my wife and I spent an afternoon in Victoria, BC.  I’m reasonably pleased with the finished product.  I didn’t attempt to add audio or video clips, but I did try out a variety of transitions and other features.

If you take the time to watch my empressr show, I welcome your comments.  I mention time because I used full size images, and the presentation takes a while to load.  It isn’t worth pressing the “Start  Presentation” button until most of the slides have loaded.

Of all the social bookmarking services I’ve looked at, I think I like Diigo best. I particularly like the ability to highlight and annotate shared web pages. I’m not yet using Diigo to full advantage, and this post is not really about Diigo.

I want to point out the visual way you can share lists of websites. In special education, we’ve long known that many people with “special needs” require visual supports in order to learn effectively. I believe, however, that most of us learn better when visual supports are available. So, I’m discussing a tool here that may be of value to almost anyone. It’s definitely worth a look.

Webslides is Diigo’s very slick option for creating and sharing sets of bookmarked websites as interactive slideshows. With Diigo, I can organize my bookmarks into lists. Any list can then be shown as a “webslide” presentation.

Each website on a list is represented by the actual page that has been bookmarked. Seeing the page provides far more information than just seeing the website’s address in a list! The slideshow is interactive in that it can be paused and you can go directly to the website via a live link in the bottom left corner of each “slide”. The slideshow can advance automatically, and you choose how long each slide is viewed. Or, you can move through the slideshow manually, and you can also choose to go back to any previous slide.

Clicking the button below will take you to the slideshow of my list of 55 websites that that I think support science curricula. I would appreciate your comments on this format if you check it out. (If you are reading this post in a Reader, you may not see the button . Please click here instead.)

Slideshows of listed websites can be shared in several convenient ways. Each slideshow has its own URL, and that can be shared. A widget, such as the button I’ve used here, can be embedded on a website, wiki, or blog. Or, the slideshow itself can even be embedded, but I found the slideshow too large to embed effectively on this blog. Embedding the full slideshow worked much better on a wider wiki page.

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