Presentation Mashup with Freepath

My last post in the Techlearning blog was about things teachers could do over the summer to improve their understanding of technology. I received one comment from Barnabas, which contained a very useful tip about a piece of software called Freepath.

Freepath is a tool that allows users to mashup a presentation by placing presentation resources into a “palette” creating a “playlist.” This can include multiple types of resources, including PowerPoints, graphics, URL’s, movies, sounds, music files, Word, spreadsheet files (even iTunes files!), really anything that you use in a presentation. You click on something in your palette and it displays on the screen-you see the palette but your participants see the projected resource. So, you can seamlessly jump around in your palette to multiple resources and the audience never knows because they see only the projected resource.

The presenter can even place multiple PowerPoint files into the palette and jump between them. When a PowerPoint is launched, another window opens with thumbnails of the slides. Multiple PowerPoints can be opened, and a presenter could select different slides from different presentations and the audience would not be the wiser (assuming the same backgrounds, fonts, etc.)

You can also pack up the playlist to archive it or share it. That’s pretty cool.

This would be really effective tool for a classroom teacher to create a really flexible learning environment or to take students to the next level in terms of their classroom presentations. This also would be a very nice addition to a classroom where a teacher had a tablet and a wireless projector.

There is a 30-day free trial available and it takes about 10 minutes to feel comfortable with the software, which is only available for Windows (sorry, Miguel).

Really cool stuff.