GAIN Presentations

In this GAIN entry, I am going to compare the Google Presentations application to the Microsoft Word Powerpoint that I primarily use. Google Presentations has done a very good job at using the same functions and format of Powerpoint. For someone who has only used Powerpoint and has never used Presentations, there was very little of a “learning curve” in operating. Many features in adding text, graphics and transitions remained the same in Presentations. There was some difference in the where and how functions, but once again it was more just the presentation of the tools or menus that was hard to learn. The main feature of Presentations that beats out Powerpoint is the ability to collaborate on a particular presentation. Where Powerpoint (and every Microsoft product), if it needs to be shared it is saved and sent to someone else with no ability to add notes or edit other than just simply changing it. Presentation, like Google Docs has the ability to add notes and comments that others can view and work with. You can also share presentations to others which then they can have the ability to simply view, add comments or have complete rights to edit. This feature would be useful for education as students could share presentations and the teacher would have access to all presentations instead of working with saving them on drives and sending them.

Presentations and Powerpoint both can be used to satisfy Common Core standards. Anchor Standard 5 for Speaking and Learning states that students need to make strategic use of digital media and visual displays of data to express information which can be accomplished with Presentations/Powerpoint. The collaboration features of Presentation and Google Docs would satisfy many of the Writing Standards to include standard 11-12 which states students are to update individual or shared writing products in response to ongoing feedback. Also Anchor Standard 10 in Writing Standards states to write routinely over extended time frames and shorter time frames for a range of discipline-specific tasks, purposes and audience.

So in conclusion, Google Presentation would be a suitable substitute and a cheaper price than Microsoft PowerPoint. With the added benefit of collaboration as with all Google products through the Cloud, Presentations would make a suitable product for school systems.

The link to my presentation in which I played with some of the features is:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1zVhJC2IIFgvTmLli17wZLHYs0JRlr7YT6rVC96FSWvg/present?slide=id.p