I’m starting to do some things in BubbleShare and believe that it holds great promise for reconceptualizing how we do some of the things in today’s higher education environment.

Students appreciate having essential information posted so that they can refer to it over time, or just-in-time, when they have a need for the information. Faculty often create PowerPoint presentations that they post, either as .ppt or .pps files, or sometimes as .pdf files. We faculty sometimes go crazy (yes, we do, admit it!) with slide presentations – including a huge number of slides and minutes of narration per slide.

We forget how bored we can get when we listen to someone drone on and on, even if it’s about a topic about which we’re highly interested! Oh if from time to time we would assume a student’s place and see how annoyed we would get with some of the things that we do!

BubbleShare is a neat website that may help us break out of the way we’ve done business and launch us toward a YouTube generation of learners. Here’s the story on what BubbleShare allows you to do:

  • upload images – as many as you’d like into an album
  • narrate an audio caption for each image – but only for 30 seconds

Ah, there’s the “helping us break out” component, isn’t it? You can only do a 30 second audio caption for each image! Wonderful! Brilliant! Forcing us to chunk our content into lengths that are more palatable to students – or even ourselves, were we to be honest with ourselves.

There are programs that faculty can use to narrate presentations and post to the web that will provide decent file sizes. Some of these include Adobe’s Captivate and Articulate. These programs and others like them are wonderful, but their learning curve can be steep and their cost may be prohibitive.

Along comes BubbleShare. Here are the few and simple steps to get you up and going with narrated slideshows on BubbleShare.

  1. Create an account.
  2. Create a PowerPoint presentation.
  3. Do a “save as” and save each slide in the presentation as a .jpg file.
  4. Upload the folder of your .jpg images to Bubbleshare.
  5. Narrate each slide individually – for only 30 seconds!
  6. Decide whether you want to make it public or whether you want to share it with specific people (such as students in a class).

That’s it! 

In April 2006 I gave a presentation on point of care and handheld technology for the American Nephrology Nurses Association conference that was held in Nashville, Tennessee, USA.

 

This was an hour-long presentation. In addition to being useful for attendees of that conference (I hope), it was also a presentation that I wanted to share with incoming students, to inform them about the power and purpose of handheld technology use in the clinical environment.

I decided that I did not want to load up the entire show in one file. Better to do a few screens that have a logical topical thread and allow people to view 5-10 minute segments of the presentation than to have them anchored to a computer for an hour or more. Think about how quickly your attention can begin to wander … then plan your segments accordingly!

What you see below are links to two segments of that presentation. I will be doing additional segments. Notice how I can embed the link for it here on the blog. You could embed the link on any web page as well. In case you want to keep the presentation more private, BubbleShare creates a link for the presentation and automatically sends you an email with the link so that you can forward that to people who might want to see the slideshow.

Click on one or both of these to be taken to the BubbleShare site to see the quality of image and voice.

 

Try BubbleShare for some of your class content and let me know how you liked it. Better yet, give my email address to your students and have them let me know how they liked it and how we can better use it for some of their important content!