Google Apps added Presentations to Google Docs and Spreadsheets

Google have just included Google Presentations into the Google Apps suite, including Google Apps for Education. You can now click on ‘New’ from the Google Docs home interface brings up the following:

As with Google Docs & Spreadsheets, it is simple to collaborate in creating presentations in Google Presentations. When you press Start presentation, you’ll see the following screen:

As with the Spreadsheets, on the right-hand side of the screen is a “Share” option, where you invite users with Google Apps accounts to share, view or collaborate. Users can also communicate via Google Talk, which is a great feature, especially when the Presentation is being shared as “collaborators”. This could be a great collaboration features, or even a way for teachers to present to their teachers all over the schools.

Anything that makes it easier to share information in an attractive, interactive, collaborative, online way with students and fellow teachers is a great tool. The following screen shows the option to share:

Like Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Google Presentations has collaboration features that allow multiple users to edit the presentation. When the presentation is ready, you switch into “presentation mode” and you can invite people to participate in a text chat, while you all watch the presentation online.

The cool thing that is the chat function, via Gtalk, so you can have your slideshow and give a live presentation and allow others to chat with you in real time. This is a way to discuss the presentation as it is being constucted and secondly as a feedback tool during a live presentation.

This is not a full-featured competitor to Microsoft PowerPoint, however, for most of what we do in school, it will certainly meet our needs. It’s also free, easy to use, and makes your presentations (and those you are sharing with others) available anywhere you have Internet access.

Since all students and teachers would already have an email address with Google Apps Gmail, you can easily give them access anytime, by sharing the Presentation by

so that they can access them anywhere, anytime, in addition to being able to track their responses to your class blogs, if you are using the iSchool Blogs.

Finally, after you have finish your editing, you can click “Publish” to save your presentation, you can share the URL with people to include them in your audience, and see who’s watching the presentation.

Google also published this video which does an awesome job of explaining one of the big problems that their Google Docs suite of programs aims to solve, collaborations.