From the start, I’ve had a love-hate relationship with the iPad! The device is well built and wonderfully intuitive to use. It’s an almost optimal platform for accessing digital media. Best of all, there are apps that make the iPad a powerful learning tool for anyone, especially someone who faces significant learning challenges.
On the other hand, in what seems to be unbelievable arrogance in the context of such costly devices, Apple decided that flash is not worth supporting. While flash may not be the way of the future, there are many thousands of existing online flash learning activities that Apple has relegated to the trash heap. Perhaps worse, most media embedded on blogs, wikis and other web sites does not show up when the sites are viewed on the iPad. Workarounds are less than ideal!
Frustration with being unable to view embedded content on Apple’s handheld devices has led me to take a fresh look at SlideShare. I first wrote about SlideShare in October of 2007. Recently, I’ve discovered that SlideShare has adapted its embed codes so that embedded presentations can be viewed on the iPad. It isn’t perfect, but it works.
SlideShare is a hugely popular file sharing service that has been around since 2006. You can upload slide shows as PowerPoint, PDF, Keynote, or OpenOffice files. You also have the option of uploading and synchronizing mp3 audio files to create “slidecasts”.
Slide shows can be viewed on the SlideShare site and shared with a link. Or, SlideShare presentations can be embedded on any other website. This makes SlideShare an excellent multimedia presentation tool in a wide variety of situations.
SlideShare’s new embed code makes embedded ‘slideshares’ visible on iOS devices.You do not see the controls that are available when the presentations are embedded elsewhere, but you can move through a slide show by swiping. Unfortunately, when a slide show has been synced with audio narration, the audio is not yet available on an Apple device.
Just for fun, here’s the first slidecast I created back in July of 2007.