Is it possible to create a narrated PowerPoint presentationa and upload it to Slideshare?  Some professors use the free, public Slideshare.net service to upload their PowerPoint presentations.  From there they can be easily embedded in web pages or, more to the point, within Blackboard.  There is even a Blackboard 9.1 mashup that supports Slideshare, so wouldn't that be the better way to go?

The problem is the audio.  Since most PowerPoint presentations are intended to be speaker's aids, there is little point in putting them on the web unless you can hear the speaker.  If you want to distribute printed information, use Word, or a PDF created from a Word document.  If you want to deliver spoken information, like a lecture or an explanation and along with the lecture provide visual aids, then PowerPoint is the tool.  Since Slideshare does not easily support audio--you cannot simply upload your narrated PowerPoint presentations to Slideshare and hear the narration--it makes the service less useful.

I said "not easily support audio."  Slideshare does support audio, but using its audio features to create a slidecast will be beyond the patience quotient of most professors.

Here is an explanatory slidecast that shows how to do it:

Say what?  You have to narrate the PowerPoint, then save the audio file as an mp3 file, then go to Slideshare and sync it up--a lengthy process with a long presentation--and then embed the presentation.  That is a few steps too many for most people.  Nevertheless, I tried it with the presentation I created for yesterday's post just to get a feel for the difficulties.  Here are my results:

As you can see, it worked, but the animations and transitions disappeared, and the real difficulty came with slide 7.  It is a slide that has multiple animations, some of which appear and disappear.  Slideshare is incapable of displaying these.  I would have had to recreate that slide as a series of slides in order to make it work.  Furthermore, sine I created my audio originally in PowerPoint, using the Narration feature, I had to come up with a way of exporting it as an mp3 file.  I could, I suppose, have used Audacity, as the instructional slidecast above suggests, but since I did not want to install it, and I already had Camtasia, I simply used Camtasia to export the audio track from the WMV movie I made yesterday as an mp3 file, which I then uploaded to slideshare and synced with my PowerPoint, which I also uploaded WITHOUT narration.

Now it is true that you can upload movies to slideshare, but if you are going to upload your wmv video in the first place, why not use YouTube, which will process it much more quickly.  The Slideshare servers seem to work pretty slowly--at least they did on the day I did my testing.  The method for syncing the audio file, not to mention the difficulty of creating it in the first place, was not overwhelming--though your mileage will vary--just time consuming.  Overall, I cannot recommend Slideshare as the best way to share a presentation with audio.  Stick with the tolls native to PowerPoint 2010 itself.