Post your PowerPoint presentations onto your blog

Do you use PowerPoint presentations during class as a visual aid or as summarized notes on your lecture? Perhaps you ask your students to present their final projects in PowerPoint. Either way, if you have a PowerPoint presentation that you want to share with others, then here’s an idea for you: Embed it into a webpage!  Yep, if you have a blog or website, you can insert the PowerPoint file right into a blog post. And the best part is the blog reader doesn’t need PowerPoint installed to see the file.

Last week, I blogged about how you can create a class blog or website to communicate with students outside of class hours. That post got me thinking about other ways teachers could share information with their students on a blog. After I learned a bit more about the PowerPoint Web App, I realized that embedded PowerPoint presentations might be the solution some teachers are looking for.

In the screenshot below, a fictitious English 101 blog post includes a PowerPoint presentation titled, “The Writing Process.”  As you can see, the blog text wraps around the embedded PowerPoint presentation.

Anyone reading your blog can click through the PowerPoint slides from within the blog post or they can open a Full Screen View.

You can do this with any blog or website service, but in this example I used the Word Press blogging service and my Hotmail email account. The following procedures explain the steps I took to get a PowerPoint presentation embedded into this blog post. It took me about 2 minutes to sign into Hotmail, upload the file, and insert it into the post.

First, I saved the PowerPoint file into SkyDrive, an online file storage service that came with my Hotmail email account. If you don’t have a Hotmail account, it’s pretty easy to sign up. When you sign up you get a free Hotmail email address, an instant messenger account, and SkyDrive online file storage.

If you're using a different blog or website service provider, or if you’re working with a SharePoint site, read How to embed a PowerPoint presentation on a web page.

Add your PowerPoint file to your SkyDrive folder

Sign into Hotmail, hover your mouse over SkyDrive and then click Documents.

Add your PowerPoint files to your Public folder. You can create private folders on SkyDrive that only you can access, but to share your PowerPoint files on a blog you’ll want to save them into your Public folder.

Note: Your Public folder is available to anybody who visits your SkyDrive page. If there are copyright or privacy concerns regarding your content, then this solution is not right for you. 

 
Click the Public folder, and then click Add files.

Copy SkyDrive embed code

Mouse over the uploaded file and then click the Show information icon (look for a blue circle with a lowercase i).

An options menu will appear on the right-side of the page, click Embed.

Copy the HTML embed code. As a shortcut, you can use your mouse to highlight all of the embed code, and then on your keyboard press the Ctrl and C keys.

Paste Skydrive embed code into your blog post

Switch to your WordPress blog post and click the HTML tab to switch to HTML view. Click your cursor where you want the PowerPoint presentation to appear, and then paste in the embed code. As a shortcut, you can paste this code using your keyboard by pressing the Ctrl and V keys. If you’re not familiar with HTML code you might have to play around until you find the right place in the code where you want your PowerPoint file to appear.

 
You’re ready to publish your blog post!

Sit back and revel at the technology!

The PowerPoint presentation will appear inside a PowerPoint Web App frame. Blog readers can flip through your PowerPoint presentation from within your blog post by clicking the Back and Forward arrows at the bottom of the frame to move through the slides.

If they click   they can view the full-size presentation.

 
I embedded ‘The Writing Process’ PowerPoint presentation into this blog post, so you can click through the presentation below for a taste of how it works.

 
What do you think? Would you ever use this service?

-- Jennifer Bost