Google Presentations

I am very excited to see how Google Presentations work after using the Google Documents. I am pretty sure it shares some features with Microsoft PowerPoint, but I am more looking forward to see how they function differently.  After I checked out some tutorial videos on http://www.atomiclearning.com/highed/en/la_tip_bsd_gdocs. The following are some comparisons I made between Google Presentations and Microsoft PowerPoint.

First, the Google Presentations is Free, which means more people can access to it. While it costs some money to buy a Microsoft Office Suite in order to use the PowerPoint.

Another difference is that the Google Presentations is online and in the cloud, which means users can access to it with Internet, no matter what kind of operating system they use. Plus, users can share the presentations with others as well. This is a great way to conduct collaboration. Users can invite people to join their presentation online, and even chat in the same window. However, Microsoft PowerPoint is part of the Office Suite, the only way to collaborate to make presentation is by sending email to each other with attachments.

PowerPoint has the AutoSave feature, while, it only automatically saves open documents at specified time periods. Unlike Microsoft PowerPoint, the Google Presentations has the automatic saving feature as well as the other Google programs, which saves the open documents in almost every second. That’s why Google Drive has no saving button. This indeed is a very functional feature.

            Even though Google Presentations has many strengths as stated above, the Microsoft PowerPoint has its special features. For instance, users do not have to rely on the Internet to access to the presentations. No one can guarantee there is a hundred percent Internet assess, so this feature, to some extent, can be strength. PowerPoint also has an option to take notes at the bottom of each slide and has many slide design options for artistic purposes, for instance, under the Animation list, there is entrance effects, emphasis effects, exit effects, motion, and other options, while the Google presentations only has fade in/fade out, fly in/fly out, zoom in/zoom out and spin options. From this example, you can see how limited and simple the Google Presentations is. When I tried to make presentations using Google Presentations, I couldn’t add music into the whole presentation. If someone wants to make really professional or artsy presentation, I am afraid the Google Presentations might not be able to meet his need.

            But Google Presentations does have its special features which will help students and teachers fulfill the requirement of the Common Core State Standard. Those special features include sharing, cloud-based storage and more. The Common Core State Standards demand that students have extensive set of skills in presenting information. For instance, one of the standards for English Language Arts is that students must learn to work together, express and listen carefully to ideas, integrate information from oral, visual, quantitative and media sources, evaluate what they hear, use media and visual displays strategically to help achieve communicative purposes, and adapt speech to context and task. With the help of the sharing feature, students can work collaboratively, which meets the requirement of working together. Students can use animations as visual display to enhance their presentation, which meet the CCSS requirement of using media and visual display. In addition, students can also use charts, tables to represent the data, which fulfill what CCSS requires of quantitative sources. I just give a few examples to show how Google Presentations can help students and teacher meet and excel the CCSS requirement.

URL of the presentation is 

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/14UC-JnT5wahB6vr1YY0wvvcL6oUA_yZh9suKHilfkBU/edit#slide=id.p