I've been doing quite a lot of speaking recently - the New Professionals Information Day in Newcastle and three different presentations at Online. As I often do, the presentations have been posted onto Slideshare for people to view or hear again. As anyone who has been to one of my presentations can confirm - they're often pictures or screenshots and nothing more - I am not of the 'cram lots of words onto a slide' school of presenting. This does however make it difficult for people to make head or tail of what they see on the screen. I could have written slides to explain the slides, but that seems self defeating for me.
Consequently, I have decided on another approach, and I bought myself a digital voice recorder from Amazon. It's very impressive - clear screen, noddy type buttons, which are very useful when you're getting set to start a presentation - you don't want to have to fiddle around with things. It doesn't interfer with any microphones either. I found putting it on the desk in front of me, or on a stand worked very well, and it picked up my voice perfectly. It does restrict me from walking around though, which I enjoy doing, so I bought a tieclip microphone from Maplin which sorts that problem. It wasn't the cheapest setup, with the whole kit coming in at a bit under £90, but there were cheaper options available if you'd rather not spend that amount. However, as I spend most of my life talking, this seemed a fair price to pay.
The recorder stores up to 1,684 hours of recording in an MP3/WMA format, and connects to the computer via a USB cable. Simply connect it and download the file. Then of course you need to play around with it a bit. I got a piece of software called Audacity which allows me to import recordings and edit them - it's very simple to use. It does mean you can get rid of all the coughs and various other 'ticks' you get in the recording. I edit it while I have the presentation on the screen, and make a note of the start and end time for each slide. Then I upload the PPT and MP3 file to Slideshare and edit it, clicking on the Slidecast option. This nice piece of software loaded into the browser on their site allows you to match the audio to the slides as appropriate. You save the presentation while you're going through it, can listen to it and change it and then when you're happy, can publish it.
I've now done this for a few presentations and I think it works really well, and if you listen to one or two at the Slideshare sight you can see and hear for yourself. It does give an added 'live' element to the presentation which I like, as you can hear the audience in the background - something you wouldn't get if you sat at home and added a voice over artifically.
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