Once I have a bunch of images, I import them into iPhoto. I create an album containing them all in order. Then I make it into a slideshow. I have a "next slide" clicker that came with my MacBook and it's all beautiful.
The problem I've had was wanting to upload to SlideShare, which wants powerpoint, keynote, or pdf format, and I couldn't find a way to turn images into pdfs. I've kludged it by importing the images into PowerPoint on my work machine, then uploading that, but it's a nuisance.
Today while playing with Automator, I discovered it has a "New PDF from images" task. So I created a workflow:
- Ask for Finder items (prompts for a folder containing a bunch of images)
- Copy Finder items (to eg the Desktop)
- Get folder contents
- Scale images (to 480 pixels - because it's only for the web)
- New PDF from images (with "Size each page to fit")
If you don't have a Mac there's probably another way to do this - but I doubt it's as cool.
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Prezi is getting a fair bit of press at the moment for its non-linear style. It is very cool, though very high-powered (and I'm too cheap for it). But I've been thinking more and more that for infolit classes, a slideshow that acted like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure would be really useful - so you didn't have to go through from slide 1 to slide 99, but could ask students a question and change the direction of the presentation to suit their answer. The "bunch of slides" format still works for me; I just want internal hyperlinks. But I'm not happy with the slideshow html templates I've seen, either.
Thinking about this, I realised what it is that I want for my slideshows: Hypercard.
<wanders off, reminiscing about the Good Old Days>
