WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at dougbelshaw.com...
I’m sure it hasn’t escaped your attention that this week Google added a ‘presentations’ feature to its Google Apps - and more specifically Google Docs - range of products. As I described over at edte.ch, some have dismissed Google Presentations as merely a poor imitation of fully-fledged desktop applications such as Powerpoint and Keynote. Others, however, have realised the potential for collaborative presentation creation - including myself.
Vicki Davis, someone who’s always on the cutting edge, created a Google Presentation about Google Presentations. She invited edubloggers and people she knew to collaborate. Within 24 hours, over 40 people had made 500 edits to the presentation, according to her post And the Walls Came Down. Yes, I was one of them (mostly stylistic changes and tidying up). 
The great thing is that any of the Google Apps allow you to go back, like a wiki, and change things back to how they were. You do this through the ‘revisions’ feature, the RSS feed of which you can also subscribe to. This means you can keep track of changes your colleagues or students make to a presentation.
It’s also included with Google Apps for Education, if you’ve already got that set up or plan to in future. I’ve got it set up on my mrbelshaw.co.uk domain and so used it with some of my students for the first time this week. It was a Year 8 (12-13 year-old) Set 4 Geography class and, although it took them 20 minutes or so to get used to it, they were soon collaborating away. They were amazed that what they changed in their presentation on one screen would then show up very soon on another. We didn’t get everything finished - they’re completing it for homework - but I’ll be interested to see the results.
Apart from collaborating with colleagues both local and at distance, I think Google Presentations is going to be an extremely useful tool. I’ll be using it with my Year 11s (15-16 year-olds) next week as an interim review/recap of what they’ve learned on their GCSE History course since coming back after the summer holidays. All they need to do is to remember to ‘invite’ me when setting up the presentation and they’re off!
One potentially useful thing is that, when presenting, there is a chat window which produces a transcript via Google Talk. If your students are collaborating with students in another school, this would be an amazing feature to use!
I shall report back on progress… 
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It seems that Google presentations is something that could be really helpful and useful for students when they are presenting projects. What sort of project is your class working on? Is it something they could also work on from home and can they each work on it separately from their individual computer and still be completing the project together? Does it present like PowerPoint?
As a soon to be new teacher I think this kind of technology is wonderful and I can’t wait to learn more about how it works and how I can use it in my future classroom!
@Becky205: I used it with my Year 8 Set 4 Geography group to reinforce concepts of population and demography. I’m more encouraged by using it this week with my Year 11 mixed-ability History GCSE group. They’ve taken to it very well and the results are pleasing.
One of the Year 11 groups I took into the library and they worked in turns with their critical partners - one researching whilst the other worked on the presentation.
With the other Year 11 group they worked on it simultaneously. Apart from the girl/boy critical partner combinations bickering over pink/blue background colours, it went well!