Presentation Tool
The Presentation tool allows you to create slide shows that can be viewed on OWL-Space by the members of your site. Each slide show is an ordered sequence of images (.jpg, .png, or .gif). Other slide shows, such as Powerpoint files, are not viewable in the Presentation tool. To provide these other types of presentations for your members, upload them in the Resources tool or provide them as attachments in other tools as appropriate.
To create a presentation, you must already have the image files for the presentation on your computer. Go to the Resources tool. There should be a directory called Presentations (note the 's'); if not, create it. Inside the Presentations folder, create a folder for every slide show you wish to create. If you upload images directly into the Presentations folder itself (not in a subfolder), they won't be visible in the Presentation tool.
In the folder for a slide show, upload all the images for that slide show. Although you can reorder the images with the Resources tool, the Presentation tool will still show them in alphabetical order, not the order they are in the Resources tool. Make sure to name your images so that their alphabetical order is the same as you want them to be ordered in your slide show. A common scheme for this naming is a word plus a number, such as Picture1, Picture2, etc.. This makes it easy to determine what the name should be if you want an image to be the fifth slide, and so on. However, note that the computer determines the order with very strict alphabetizing, reading each number or letter one at a time. It sees "100" as one-zero-zero, not as one hundred. Because of this, the Presentation tool will show "Picture100" before "Picture2" since 1 comes before 2 alphabetically. To avoid these problems, use leading zeroes to pad any smaller numbers so that all the numbers used to name your files are the same length. "Picture002" will be displayed before "Picture100," and so on.
This is all you have to do to create your slide shows.
When you click on the Presentation tool, you will see a list of all of your slide shows. You may need to click on the Refresh link at the top to force any recent additions to appear. The title of each presentation is the name of the sub-folder of the Presentations folder that it is stored in. Next to the title are two links, View and Show.
The View link opens a new page where any member of the site can look through the slide show. The first slide is displayed immediately. Click on Previous Slide to move back one slide, and Next Slide to move forward one slide. Click Done to return to the main page of the Presentation tool.
The Show link is only available to the instructor (or anyone else with write access to the Presentations folder), and opens a page very similar to View. However, once the instructor has clicked on Show and gone to the Show view, all members will now see a Join link next to that slide show in the Presentation tool main page. Clicking on Join will take them to another very similar view of the slide show, but they will be in Watching mode. While in Watching mode, members will see the slide the instructor is viewing in Show mode. As the instructor advances through the slides in Show mode, the Watching members pages will update to show each slide automatically (after a delay of 10 seconds or less). When done, the instructor can click on the Stop Show link at the top to exit Show mode and return to the main Presentation tool page. This removes the Join link. Members in Watching mode can choose to Exit Show at any time to stop watching and return to the main Presentation tool page, by clicking on Exit Show.