Move Past Powerpoint with Present.me

Move Past Powerpoint with Present.me:
Let’s be honest, powerpoint presentations just don’t cut it these days, at least in my opinion. As an educator for my full time job, I am always challenged with ways that I can engage my students in their learning. To most students, school is boring, and we need to spice it up so that they can enjoy it. Gone are the days of just throwing up a powerpoint and wowing students, customers, etc with your cool graphs or transitions. We need to move past this if we are going to captivate our audience.
Present.me does exactly just this by giving you an intuitve way to create presentations that are engaging and can create communication between you and your audience. You want to engage your audience and have them conversate around the presentation so that learning can happen in a greater way. Present.me gives you, the presenter, various ways to present your material and gives your audience the opportunity to interact with you.

Creating a Presentation

There are a variety of options to present your information that Present.me gives you to use. You can choose to have slides and a video to explain each slide, or you can choose to just have audio. If you want to go the plain route, you have the option to just present your slides, and you can also just record a video as well. When picking your slides, you have two options to choose from. You can upload your documents from your computer using a variety of formats, ranging from .docs to .pdf. You can upload just about any type of document except pictures. This was a little disappointing, but hopefully this is something they’ll add in the future. Secondly, you can upload from your Google Docs when you connect your Google account. This is a nice feature to have, especially with more and more people moving to the cloud for their document writing and storage.

Uploading documents for your slides

Once you upload the slides you want to use for your presentation, it is now time to liven it up by either using video or audio. When recording for these formats, you are presented with your slides to the left and you can flip through them recording yourself. Videos as well as audio can be trimmed so that you have only exactly what you need to use for your presentation.

Adding video to your presentation

Sharing and Social Features

Once you are done with creating your slideshow, you can now share it privately or publically with your audience. If you want to share your presentation publically, you can give people the url of the presentation, or you can email it to them, as well as embed the code of it on your website. Maybe you want to share it with only a select few people, which then you can make it private and create a password that people need in order to get to the slideshow.

Filling in details of your presentation

Of course no presentation is complete without some kind of social aspect to it and Present.me does not disappoint in this area. Each of your slideshows can be tweeted, “liked”, and even +1 on Google +. They can also be favorited by your audience as well as commented on. This gives you, the presenter, a great way to interact with your audience.

Social features and commenting

Pricing

Present.me takes the freemium route when it comes to pricing their web application. With your free account you get three presentations a month, a time limit of 15 minute presentations, and 1 private presentation per month. From there it goes up to the Plus account where you can significantly more of everything, and then for those of you that are diehard presentation creaters, they have a Pro account where you get unlimited presentations, and some other perks. The Plus account goes for $9 a month, while the Pro account will set you back $39. If you are an educator or an enterprise user, you can qualify for deeper discounts, which are noted on the site, but you don’t get specific details.

Pricing Plans

Final Thoughts

After getting to play with Present.me for a week or so, I have to say, I came away impressed by how easy it was to use the app. It was very easy to get started and to upload your slides with video or audio. The one thing that I really liked about the web app was that I could potentially use it for a variety of reasons. If I need to show a video to explain the slides, I can do that, and if I need to just do a simple slideshow, I can do that as well. Present.me is very flexible and can meet the needs of almost any type of presentation that you need.
If you are looking for a different way to present or just can’t get in front of your audience to explain something, this is a great app to try out. I love that it is web based so you can access and create your presentations from any where that has an internet connection. I am not sure if the pricing structure is competitive or not, but I definitely think it is worth trying out. The future of presentations is moving past the boring old powerpoint, and Present.me is definitely helping you to capture your audience and gain their attention.