Sharing the Gospel of Slideshare

I love talking about and working with technology. It’s been one of the hallmarks of my short tenure in higher education, and I genuinely enjoy being that helpful tech guy in the office. But, at times, I haven’t marketed myself in quite the right way. I’m not a big idea, large-scale systems administrator kind of guy like some people think. Instead, my real knack for technology has come through the exploration and application of small tools that have a big impact on different areas of my professional life. One of those tools is the awesome website SlideShare.net - it has been incredibly useful to me (as well as other notable #SAchat participants), and, in the spirit of being a professional that gives back, I wanted to highlight the three main ways I have used this site in my own work that could easily translate to essentially any other student affairs office.

1) Use it as an internal training and resource hub

It can often be difficult for offices that have traditionally relied on paper documentation to make a full switch to digital resource management. Fortunately, SlideShare provides a sustainable way to keep and share presentations. Not only can uploaded presentations be re-downloaded at a later time, they can also be set to private so that they are viewable only for people within the organization. More than that, SlideShare is an easy way to have a reliable and consistent training resource across a department or division. Take, for instance, training on Title IX reporting requirements: the presentation could be uploaded once to SlideShare and disseminated on a regular basis through the provided link. This saves valuable space in colleagues’ inboxes and allows for an administrator to have one consistent link that can be updated as needed.

2) Provide reliable, accessible information to external constituents

One of my last tasks at my previous job was to create a tutorial for students using a new, online room condition report form for our Residence Life office. This new form could be daunting to students and administrators alike, so I wanted to be 100% sure that my instructions would be crystal clear to everyone involved. Instead of creating a written tutorial on our website, I opted to create a SlideShare presentation that could be shared at the drop of a hat. This presentation served as a useful tutorial not just for students who learned best by reading, but also for students who learned best by seeing - we were able to provide a consistent, clear visual language for using the reporting form that could be accessed any time the student needed it. And goodness knows that is a better option than having a student email you at 3:00 AM for help and then again at 8:00 AM wondering why you didn’t respond to their first email yet.

3) Get some creative inspiration from others’ slide decks

I’ve talked at length before about how important it is to have a crisp, clean presentation to engage your audience, so I won’t go into that nitty gritty in this post. Still, creating good slide decks is a crucial skill for presenters to have. One of the best latent benefits of SlideShare is the ability to look through thousands of other presentations to get ideas for structure, layout, and design. You can even search specifically by topic to sort the wheat from the chaff (higher education has a strong contingent on SlideShare). Good design is an evolving beast, and SlideShare offers a free, easy way to keep up on recent trends without much other investment on your part!

SlideShare may not be for you, and that’s perfectly fine. If your department doesn’t use presentations much, you may not have a whole lot of use for a service like this. Still, this is just one example of a free resource on a very, very wide Internet. If nothing else, let this serve as a reminder: if you’ve ever asked the question, “Do you think this exists on the Internet?” there’s a good chance that it just might.

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Kevin Valliere is an academic adviser at New York University. He earned his bachelor's degree at the University of Missouri and his master's degree at Texas A&M University. He has worked with the Technology Knowledge Community for three years in multiple roles, and previously worked in Residence Life at Texas A&M and St. John's University.