As I promised to do at Don and Sarah’s excellent session at the SHP Conference, I’ve put together a guide below as to how to make a slideshow presentation for mobile phones and iPods. This can be a good way to use the technology students already have to good effect. Really it’s simply a consecutively-numbered series of images saved in Powerpoint (or OpenOffice Impress) in JPEG format. Here’s how to do it… :)

1. First of all, let’s get Powerpoint set up properly. Go to File/Page Setup and put Powerpoint into Portrait mode.

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2. You may have a presentation that you want to convert, or you may want to create one from scratch. The thing to bear in mind is that each slide is going to be 320×240 in size (QVGA*) which means the the font you use HAS TO BE BIG! (a good guide for this is if you zoom out to about 25% – if it’s still legible it’s OK…)

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3. Make sure there’s a title page to your slideshow and use high-contrast, colourful fonts and backgrounds. It might be an idea to use a different colour scheme for each different slideshow. Use an easy-to-read font and avoid subtle pictures. Go for the big, obvious ones (cartoons and clipart are good!)

4. When you’re happy with the way it looks, save it as a normal Powerpoint presentation.

5. Now you’re going to save it again as a series of JPEGs. Go to Save As and give it a name (this will be the name of your folder – each slide will be called Slide1, Slide2, etc.) In the drop-down menu choose to save your presentation as JPEGs.

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6. In the Options box, make sure the Save Every Slide option is checked and choose to have graphics compressed using the High setting. Change the height in the Size box to 320 pixels (the width should automatically change to 240).

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7. Press Save and your presentation should be saved to the location you chose with the folder name you entered.

8. Preview the slides in the folder.

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9. Transfer the folder of images to a mobile phone to check it works properly.

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10. (optional) Create a zip archive of the folder to put on your website or distribute easily. Mac users can do this by simply right-clicking on the folder and selecting Create Archive. I suggest that Windows users use 7-zip.

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Tip: Depending on your phone you may find that slides go from Slide 1 to Slide 10, Slide 11, etc. before going to Slide 2. To rectify this simply rename Slides 1-10 as Slide01, Slide02, etc. :)

You can also do this in OpenOffice Impress using much the same method. I’d appreciate it if you’d leave a comment here if you’ve managed to do this. Any additional hints and tips would be much appreciated, as would any requests for clarification! :p

The zip file of the series of images above that I quickly knocked up for the GCSE History Development of Medicine Through Time course can be found here (400KB)

* Techie note: Although there are mobile phones with greater resolutions (including mine) it’s best to stick to Quarter-VGA (QVGA) for the moment as that’s fairly ubiquitous for mobiles with colour displays. The iPod Nano, if you’re interested, has a screen resolution of 176×132 pixels… :D