Simple Web Site Presentations with Tabbed Browsing
If all the information that you want to present in a lecture is easily available on web sites, then don’t bother to make up a whole PowerPoint presentation. Instead, use tabbed browsing to prepare your presentation, and call it a BrowserPoint presentation.
There are some things that web sites can do much better than PowerPoint. For instance, I am a big fan of multimedia timelines that show the same map at several points in history. Certain Art History sites also have great collections of art by a single artist that would just be a waste of time to copy into PowerPoint (check out Best of History Web Sites Art History Page for some great links). Some sites are also set up for viewing several multimedia news and documentary clips, and both TV and print media are creating more web sites with this type of presentation. All of these things are more easily viewed from a web browser than from PowerPoint.
The new technology that allows for these types of BrowserPoint presentations is the tabbed browser. This means that in a single window, you can have “tabs” with different preloaded web sites. This makes it quite easy to jump backwards and forwards amongst several different sites. Weaving together a few different web sites into a single presentation has never been easier, as long as you have access to the internet in your classroom. Some browsers also make it easy to share groups of pages, which means you can share your Browser Point Presentations
Mozilla’s Firefox (www.mozilla.com) is a free web browser that is good for setting up tabbed browser presentation, although the new Internet Explorer from Microsoft has a few additional features that make it a better choice for BrowserPoint presentation.
Here are some basic steps to creating a BrowserPoint presentation using tabbed browsers in Internet Explorer 7(IE7).
Getting Started- Find the first page you would like to use in your presentation. Click on the Add Favorite button, which is a star with a plus on the left hand side. You will be prompted to put the new favorite in a folder. Use New Folder to create a new folder for your presentation.
Adding Pages- Search for the web sites you want to use, and save them to your new BrowserPoint folder. You can keep clicking the Add Favorites button, or you can In IE7, click on Add Favorites and then choose to put the web site in your presentation folder.
Naming Links-To simplify your presentation, you will probably want to rename your links. Rename them starting with “Slide 1,” “Slide 2,” and so forth and things will be easy to organize.
Opening the Presentation- Once you have all of your sites chosen and placed in your folder, preparing the presentation is easy. Just open up a new web browser, and open up your Favorites folder by clicking on the yellow star in the upper left hand corner. (You may want to also click on the Green Arrow in the upper right hand corner of the Favorites sidebar which will pin your Favorites folder to the screen.) Then right-click on the BrowserPoint folder and select Open in Tab Group and voila, all of your pages/slides will open.
Delivering the Presentation- To deliver your presentation, just click on each tab to advance your presentation. If you ever get lost or need to jump back a few slides, IE7 has a handy Quick Tabs button, just to the left of all of the open tabs. Click this button (or press Control-Q) and you will get a handy visual index of your tabs, very reminiscent of the Slide Sorter in PowerPoint.
Enlarging Pages and Text- If some of your pages are too small to read, there is a handy Zoom function under the Page menu in the top right of the toolbar. You can also just enlarge the text by adjusting the Text Size option in the Page menu.
Sharing BrowserPoints- To share your BrowserPoint, right-click on the folder and choose copy, and then paste the folder somewhere easy to find, like your Desktop or Documents folder. Attach the folder in an email to a colleague (it will be tiny, maybe 2KB), and tell him to download the file. Once he has it on his computer, he can open up IE7, click on the Add Favorites button and choose Import and Export. A Wizard will pop up and he should choose Import Favorites. He will then need to find the BrowserPoint folder on his computer, and then he can import the folder right into his Favorites. You could teach your students to do this importing, and then email then them your BrowserPoint folders so they can review the presentations on their own. Even if they don’t use IE7, these folders can be opened like a regular folder and the links inside can be opened in any browser.
William Jennings Bryan BrowserPoint
Here are three slides from a presentation on the Scopes Monkey Trial. The first tab is a site with some introduction and photos, the second site is an illustrated timeline of the trial, and the third site is from Earliest Voices, a wonderful web site from Michigan state that features recordings from the early twentieth century that are displayed with transcripts. This is a full multimedia BrowserPoint presentation that runs entirely in a web browser.
To dowload this BrowserPoint, right-click the link below and choose Save Link As. It is a zipped folder, so you will need to unzip it first. You can then upload the folder into your IE7 Favorites using the techniques described above.
If you want to have some text to accompany your BrowserPoint, just create some new posts on your blog (remember to use a large font size for easy viewing), and then add those pages as to your BroswerPoint folder.
If you want to add some audio commentary to your BroswerPoint, like instructions on what students should look for in the sites, create a podcast with a tool like Odeo and then add that page to the folder in Favorites.
