Students often create excellent papers that others can learn from. Similalry, when given the opportunity to present in a class, student presentations may be as informative as what the course instructor can provide. Technology has moved to a place where it is now very easier for students to create presentations that can be quickly placed on line and shared with other students. The simplest way to achieve this may be through the use of PowerPoint. PowerPoint is an extremly popular product and is widely available. And, because of the built-in wizards, transforming a presentation into web-ready material is a very simple process.

Generally, when using PowerPoint as a platform for students to create on-line presentations, they are given specific instructions about expectations. These include:

1) A minimum number slides (varies from course to course).

2) There must be a title slide.

3) There must be 1 or more reference slides.

4) At least one slide must contain an image.

5) The slides must follow some prescribed order.

Once the slide show has been created, students are instructed to save the presentation using the "Save as HTML" command on the File pull-down menu. This will open a wizard that asks a number of questions. Students have the option of responding to each question, thereby "customizing" ther presentation, or simply choosing "Finish." The now web-ready material can be supplied to the instructor via e-mail, or delivered on a disk. The instructor simply creates a hyperlink to each individual presentation, and the process is complete. To ensure that students review presentations created by others, they maybe required to respond to specific questions about each presentation that are posted on a class webbard. For more information on webboards, go here. If you would like to see some sample student projects, click here.