WordPress for a presentation

Yesterday’s Digital Storytelling workshop went really well so I wanted to share the presentation I put together over here.

I had to borrow Abby‘s laptop because our own isn’t reliable anymore (I’m on a desktop now — it’s crazy. It’s like 2005 up in here). I wasn’t sure if she had presentation software and I’m sick of Powerpoint anyway so I decided to build the presentation online. I tried some free software and it was buggy and crashing and making me crazy. After many wasted hours, I hit on using a WordPress install. I’m extremely happy with the way this turned out.

There are a lot of advantages to using blogging software to create a presentation. One, it’s easy to make it look the way you want it to look. I knew I wanted a very simple installation with a clean, unfettered appearance. I looked for themes without sidebars and hit on Suffusion, which is easy to customize even if you can’t or don’t want to dig into code. I knew I likely wouldn’t be using any widget areas but this particular theme has a lot of widget configuration options — sidebars, footers, etc.

The other thing that was important to me for the presentation was accessibility. I wanted the attendees to be able to come back to the information without cluttering anyone up with hand-outs. Because I was sharing videos, I also wanted to make it easy for students to quickly find those videos again from their own laptops. To do this with a Powerpoint would have meant relying on a file sharing site like Slideshare, which is a frustrating site for me time-wise and design-wise. There is no love lost between me and Slideshare. Using WordPress makes it easy for anyone to go back to the presentation and also made it easy for me to share resources via the blogroll/links.

I didn’t open up comments for this workshop although I see how that could add to a workshop experience. It might be something I’d consider in the future.

If you look at Digital Storytelling, you can see how I structured it similar to a PowerPoint. We teach at Wild Goose Creative, which has wifi — an important factor for an online presentation. I made the WordPress site’s front page an actual static page. You can create that in the “reading” section of WordPress. I didn’t set a page for the blog to post to because I knew I wouldn’t need a blog page. Instead I set it up so that there was only one blog post per page. You can see this in the image below:

That gave me a front page that acts as an introduction page.

Then I started adding entries. I added each entry the way you would in any old blog but I kept things short because I wanted everything to fit on the screen so I wouldn’t have to scroll. (We use a projector and a laptop so I knew what size screen I’d be dealing with.) As I tweaked the presentation order, I changed the dates in the Publish menu so that things would show up where I wanted them to. For example, the first entry I made was Madeleine L’Engle‘s quote but I needed that to happen much later in the workshop. I just changed the date to make sure it showed up between the two entries I needed it to go between — so later than the one but earlier than the other.

To make the “Start the Workshop” tab show in the menu, I installed a plugin called “Page Links To” (I use it here, too, to put Madison’s blog and Open Adoption Support in the navigation menu up there at the top). Basically this plugin adds a new field to your “Add New” Page menu. You create the title for your page, skip writing an actual entry and then scroll down to this new Page Links To field, which asks for a url. You add the url that you want the page to link to and voila! You have a Page that is actually a link. This is an incredibly handy plugin for managing your blog’s page navigation system without doing any code hacking.

So. I used the very first entry’s url as the page url with my Page Links To plugin, titled the page “Start the Workshop” and that added that nifty little menu tab up at the top of my presentation.

Because there was only one entry on each page, I then simply scrolled through my archives (another plus to the blog theme I chose is the clean, easy to follow “previous” and “next” navigation above each entry. MUCH nicer than the theme I’m using here. Makes me want to change it out. Seriously). I took screenshots of each of the videos to make those images and then linked the images to the video’s homepage. I didn’t want to embed the players because I thought it’d be easier to open up the video files in browser tabs before we got started. This way their flash files could begin loading (and so we wouldn’t have to wait for them when it was time to watch). Also I liked the way it looked. But mostly it was to make it easier to quickly scroll through the presentation and then simply click to an open tab to watch each video as needed.

Anyway. I thought I’d share both the presentation and the tech behind it. If you have questions about the install or about the content of the presentation, let me know and I’ll come back between busyness. (Like the quotes at the end? I can talk about why I chose them and what we did around them so you’ll have a better understanding of how the workshop worked.) Again, here’s the link.