SlideShare is an online tool that allows you to upload slide presentations, infographics, documents, and videos to share so others can view your work. I’ve actually had a SlideShare account for quite awhile, but hadn’t uploaded anything because my slideshow presentations are full of animations, media, and narration which don’t work with the SlideShow tool.

I hate long slideshows! If a slideshow has more than about 20 slides, I won’t even look at it—and I sure won’t subject kids to it—so when I couldn’t find a decent SlideShare slideshow to embed, I decided to modify one of my own—one of the few that’s not animated—and upload it to my Slideshare account under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike.

“Content Reading in Middle School Social Studies” slideshow highlights the Special Collections I created in my Library to support the Content Area Reading Initiative begun by our district’s Social Studies department a few years ago. The slideshow  introduces the program, shows images of stickers that identify books in the collections, and how students can record the books, and suggested supplemental magazines, they read. At each library visit I show the Learning Target slide, the Benefits slide, and then only the program slides pertaining to that particular grade level—3 more for 6g, 4 for 7g, and 5 for 8g—so each slideshow is less than 10 slides, giving students plenty of time to browse for and check out books.

I think SlideShow is OK for static slide or document presentations, and it does provide an online storage platform for videos, to which I could convert my animated slideshows; however, it doesn’t seem to me to have enough interactivity to make it a very engaging teaching tool. I can see how it would be a good beginning experience for students in online sharing of simple documents they create.